HEROIC 
. FRANCE 



By ANNA BOWMAD«f DODD 




Pass Msj^l/ - 

RnnV ^ SB b 
CopightN? 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIR 



HEROIC FRANCE 



BY 



ANNA BOWMAN DODD 

AUTHOR OF 

"Three Normandy Inns," "Falaise, the Town of 

the Conqueror," *'On the Knees of 

the Gods," etc., etc. 



NEW YORK 

POOR'S MANUAL COMPANY 
1915 






Copyright, 1915, by 
ANNA BOWMAN DODD 



PRESS OF 

POOR'S MANUAL. NEW YORK 



lAR 22 1915 '^ 
GU397242 



In 

'S. 









MRS. DODD'S BOOKS 

Cathedral Days. 

Three Normandy Inns. 

Glorinda. 

On The Broads. 

Falaisa — The Town of The Conqueror. 

The American Husband in Paris. 

In The Palaces of The Sultan. 

On TheKnees of The Gods. 

In and Out of a French Country House. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 
A Nation in Arms 1 

CHAPTER II 
The Caillaux Trial 11 

CHAPTER III 

The President's Visit to Russia .... 20 

CHAPTER IV 

A German View oi France 33 

CHAPTER V 

The Assassination of Jaures 45 

CHAPTER VI 

The Week of Dread 55 

CHAPTER VII 

France — the Living Sword 69 

CHAPTER VIII 

When the Germans were at Compiegne . . 83 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IX 
Paris on the Eve of Capture .... 100 

CHAPTER X 

How Paris was Saved 110 

CHAPTER XI 

The Story of JLille's Abandonment . . . 127 

CHAPTER XII 

The Army I Saw at Lisieux 136 

CHAPTER XIII 

The German Fort Near Caen 146 

CHAPTER XIV 

Modern Frenchmen 154 

CHAPTER XV 
Some Racial Traits 174 

CHAPTER XVI 

The Contrast in Ideals 196 



Heroic France 

CHAPTER I 

The Nation in Arms 

A FRANCE that vibrated to a com- 
mon, passionate emotion, and from 
the Cotes du Nord to the Cotes 
de r Azur ; the great heart of France throb- 
bing with such intensity of feeUng that 
her Ups in the first hours of the shock 
of the tremendous reahties before her 
were all but mute— this mighty heart 
of France on the second day of August 
had leapt within her with the same 
sense of sacrificial joy as the mother 
feels when the child below her bosom 

1 



2 HEROIC FRANCE 

stirs with life; her own Hfe may be the 
forfeit of her triumphant assurance of 
the new forces within — but what mother, 
what nation gifted with such glorious 
endowments of mind, of nature and of 
spirit as France counts the cost of 
sacrifice? 

Never, perhaps, in the long centuries of 
her historic existence has France experi- 
enced the single-hearted enthusiasm that 
swept the country as village after vil- 
lage, town after town read the order for 
a general mobilization. On that second 
day of August France presented to the 
eyes of the world, as she must to those of 
her marveling enemy, a nation as closely 
knit, as intimately, as inextricably welded 
together, as Germany believed her to be 
hopelessly divided. Party hate, politi- 
cal dissensions had disappeared, as if by 
magic. There were neither Socialists, 



THE NATION IN ARMS 3 

nor Royalists, nor Internationalists, nor 
Radicals. There was one France, superb 
in its courage, conscious of its moral and 
military strength, outwardly calm, yet 
burning hot within, from the very intens- 
ity of its joyous enthusiasm. 

At last, France was to be allowed to 
fight! 

The long years of her suppressed hate; 
the shame, the humiliation she had suf- 
fered at the hands of her deadly, powerful 
enemy; the spectre of dread that had 
haunted her prosperous fields, that had 
hovered over her wide-spread commerce, 
that had made every move in the defen- 
sive, international game fraught with 
possible danger — this hate could at last 
find its longed-for victim. The shame 
of Fashoda and the humiliation that had 
followed the dismissal of one of France's 
most gifted ministers — of Monsieur Del- 



4 HEROIC FRANCE 

casse — could now be wiped out by a 
French invasion of Berlin. The haunting 
dread of war could be turned into the 
blazing glory of victory. 

In all France there was, indeed, but one 
mind and one heart. She was a vast 
family, fronting a common enemy. 

This all but instantaneous welding to- 
gether had been accomplished as though 
by enchantment. In less than a few days 
after the violent explosions of party dis- 
cussions, fired by the disgraceful Caillaux 
trial, and only four days after the assas- 
sination of Jaures, the miracle of a patri- 
otic France, from which every vestige of 
party strife had disappeared, was the 
nation's answer to the misled German 
War-Lords. The anxious days that had 
elapsed before the mobilization of the 
French army, and the nervous tension 
resulting from the fluctuations of hope 



TEE NATION IN ARMS 5 

and fear of the worst, had worked upon 
the sensitive French nature. When the 
order for mobihzation was made pubUe, 
France had found herself. The test of 
the new forces that had been at work 
forging a new France was triumphantly 
met. 

From the very first the whole nation 
presented, to the last man, that singular 
calm, that power of restraint and of a dig- 
nified acceptance of the chances that lay 
before them — for success, for victory, or 
for a possible crushing defeat, — that were 
to prove a moral force in French charac- 
ter wholly unsuspected; as yet, perhaps, 
even unknown to themselves. Self -revel- 
ation comes as a lightning flash in the 
storm that tests character. 

When France rose in heroic defense of 
her soil, her people, her rights, and, also 
of that higher form of civilization of 



6 HEROIC FRANCE 

which she need not, unlike her clumsier 
neighbor, boast in loud, trumpet-blasts — 
since the delicate and exquisite flower of 
her civihzation blooms in one form or an- 
other throughout all Christendom, liter- 
ally shedding its beneficent perfume on 
the just and on the unjust — from the in- 
stant France flew to carry her flag to the 
front she was to give the world one of the 
first of the surprises the war was to yield. 

The order to mobilize was received 
throughout the entire country with sur- 
prising, with superb calm. 

"Ca y est!" 

This was the cool, phlegmatic comment 
that leapt to the lips of thousands of men, 
as they read that within twenty-four 
hours they were to be ready to join their 
regiments. In Paris, as in the provinces, 
workmen and nobles, peasants and manu- 
facturers, merchants and petits rentiers. 



THE NATION IN ARMS 7 

left workshops, chateaux, farms, factories, 
shops and modest homes, at the word of 
command, in orderly haste. The last 
quaUty one would predict Frenchmen 
would display at such a crisis was the 
one conspicuously exhibited. The whole 
nation was stiffened into an attitude of 
rigid sang-froid. Now and again the 
deeper, inner meaning of a word is re- 
vealed. The Frenchman's coining of that 
compound word ''sang-froid" was no 
accident. Beneath all the effervescence, 
the garrulity, the explosive enthusiasm, 
there are other more profound, ethno- 
logical deposits in French character. 
That deeper source can only be stirred by 
the moving finger of pain or of some great 
national calamity. 

"Tout le peuple francais, sans distinc- 
tion de classes, est fremissant d'impati- 
ence et garde le sang-froid, indice de son 



8 HEROIC FRANCE 

inebranlable volonte" — and this from a 
Bordelaise Journal! 

Those of us who witnessed the depart- 
ure of the French troops for the front; 
who looked upon those serene, smiling, 
controlled countenances could not but 
marvel at so surprising a revelation of 
*'cold-blooded" courage. 

It was superb, it was sublime — but it 
seemed hardly French. The whole will 

of a great people was bent to a single 
purpose. Their calm was not want of 
emotion. It was rather due to an excess 
of feeling. 

There was another element colder still 
than the steely bravery animating the 
least impressionable "piou-piou." There 
was a cold hate that had been all but 
unconsciously nursed to this white heat 
and for long years. 

"Pourvu que ce soit pour cette fois-ci." 



TEE NATION IN ARMS 9 

That cry of a Vosges peasant as he 
read his order to don his uniform, was 
the general, the universal prayer that 
burst from the lips of millions of French- 
men. The waiting on time to bring about 
its revenges had worn deep furrows into 
French patience. The hate of Prussia, 
that had lain half -buried beneath politi- 
cal upheavals, now blazed forth with 
volcanic ferocity. 

The lava-flood of national enthusiasm, 
of this re-kindled passion for revenge, had 
swept France, burying beneath its fiery 
outbreak all minor discords, all purely 
family wreckage. The issues before the 
nation were known to be momentous. 
From the very first, though brave France 
could say with firm lips, "Well, it has 
come at last. We are ready," — not know- 
ing she was only half-ready — yet from 
the very first it knew the coming struggle 



10 HEROIC FRANCE 

was to be for France's very existence. It 
was to be a life and death combat. 

These tragic days had been preceded 
by the sensational Caillaux trial, a trial 
whose social and political consequences 
had aroused the bitterest feeling through- 
out France. 



CHAPTER II 

The Caillaux Trial 

IN the life of nations, as in that of 
individuals, tragic events in certain 
crises have been known to follow 
in such quick succession as to suggest 
a conscious planning of dramatic se- 
quence. Later investigations reveal the 
long chain of casualities which pre- 
cipitated the climax. 

During this mid- July, 1914, France 
was rent and torn, was at once horrified 
and appalled, as she was also to be 
vastly entertained by the crowded figures 
that filled her stage. 

11 



12 HEROIC FRANCE 

France at this eventful period was 
one vast audience. All eyes were cen- 
tered on the Caillaux trial. As all the 
world remembers, M. Calmette, Editor 
of the Paris Figaro, had determined 
upon the ruin of M. Caillaux, then 
Minister of Finance. 

Although posing as a patriot, inspired 
by the loftiest ideals of pohtical conduct, 
M. Calmette's methods of attack were 
of the lowest defamatory character. He 
even descended to the crime of printing 
private letters. It was known through- 
out Paris that two letters, of a par- 
ticularly intimate character, were in 
his possession; the publication of these 
letters would have meant the ruin of 
the ex-Prime Minister's wife. Driven 
to the point of desperation by the fear 
that Calmette might publish these letters 
to damage still further her husband's 



THE CAILLAUX TRIAL 13 

reputation as well as her own, to 
prevent such an exposure Madame 
Caillaux sought the editor in his own 
office and killed him. 

In the ensuing trial every element 
essential to drama, as well as situations 
replete with tragic consequences, were 
presented with lavish abundance. The 
central figure at the opening of the 
trial was the murderess — a woman. 
The lady, one must call her such — she 
being the wife of an ex-Prime Minister 
— ^was sufficiently young to excite both 
interest and curiosity; her past was 
one a gossip-thirsty public delights in, 
since her history was flecked by those 
somewhat dubious lights and dusty 
shadows that play upon an adventurous 
career. 

The other dramatis personae in this 
sensational trial were such as one looks 



14 HEROIC FRANCE 

upon, indeed, chiefly from across the 
foothghts; when thus grouped together, 
they serve as an effective background. 
Only in half a century or so can one 
hope to see them figuring realistically 
in a witness-box. 

Ex-Prime Ministers; ministers who 
had stood high in public favor; political 
adherents; personal friends; and an 
ex- wife, — each in turn, day after day, 
mounted behind the iron railing. As 
the trial proceeded, little by little its 
original raison d'etre seemed to have 
been quite changed. In lightning flashes 
successive revelations were playing their 
lurid light on corruption in high places. 
The swift change from the judging of 
a crime supposed to have been prompted 
by intimate personal motives, to issues 
of vast political and national importance, 
made this trial second only in dramatic 



THE CAILLAUX TRIAL 15 

setting and far-reaching consequences 
to the Dreyfus scandal. 

To the curious eyes of the world at 
large, the scenes presented in the Paris 
criminal courts during the proceedings 
of this famous trial were typically, 
essentially French — for the world at 
large knows little of either French life 
or of French character. To semi-amused, 
semi-contemptuous spectators, France is 
the nation which above all others is 
dramatic, with a highly developed taste 
for sensation. Her methods of admin- 
istering justice are peculiarly her own. 

In this particular trial political passion 
was proved to be stronger far than the 
justice to be done to a dead editor. 
The witness box had been turned into 
a tribune, from which orators could 
hurl frenzied attacks on their political 
enemies. Tawdry political linen, soiled 



16 HEROIC FRANCE 

and stained, of past scandals was seized, 
was shaken into shape of fresh invective, 
was exultingly exposed to the pubHc 
gaze, for pubhc condemnation. Intimate 
domestic and marital scenes passed be- 
fore the amused eyes of the world with 
a cinematograph realism. All the earher 
issues lost their edge of importance, 
however, when the will of the dead 
editor was produced and was read to 
a scandalized public; the will itself was 
proof sufficient to condemn Monsieur 
Calmette's base methods of securing his 
13,000,000 of francs; but the presumably 
illegal working of the power vested in 
high government officials for possession 
of the document aroused France to a 
storm of indignant protest. 

When the verdict of acquittal came, 
the scene in the courtroom — a scene of 
indescribable fury with its shouts and 



TEE CAILLAUX TRIAL 17 

cries of irrepressible rage, of impotent 
anger — was enacted on a vaster scale 
on the stage of political, religious and 
social France. 

To the French clear, logical vision, 
it was as though France itself, its 
institutions, its courts of law and justice, 
had been on trial. Republican France 
seemed to confess openly her democratic 
form of government had gone down in 
failure. France felt herself stripped of 
her dignity; naked and ashamed, she 
was held up to be the mock of nations. 

It was the hour for the triumph of 
the enemies of the government. Roy- 
ahsts and those young enthusiasts — the 
Cadets du Roi — could lift their heads; 
with this imminent collapse of the 
Republic the little heir of the Napoleon 
dynasty, son of a Belgian princess, 
might yet wear a crown. The Catholics 



18 HEROIC FRANCE 

bewailed the decay of the faith; the 
awful spectacle of this lowering of all 
ideals of honor, of justice, was surely 
due to the separation of church and 
state; the systematic neglect of early 
religious training and revolt against 
clerical authority had shown France, 
by the most eloquent of proofs — 
results — the mistake of its policy of 
suppression. Socialists and Radicals in 
their turn rubbed their exultant hands; 
the more signs of decay in the social 
fabric, the easier it would be to overturn 
the tottering edifice. 

There was, indeed, such an unchaining 
of the passions as seemed to prelude a 
revolutionarv outburst. All the air was 
rife with prophecy. The actual Reign 
of Terror, one was told by alarmists, 
was not far off; the Marat of the coming 
Revolution would be he who had stood 



THE CAILLAUX TRIAL 19 

in the witness box haranguing France 
and the world, parading his eloquence 
to prove his soiled hands clean — as leader 
of his party — rather than wasting valu- 
able time in defence of his wife. 

Such was the scene set upon the great 
French stage in those tragic days of 
the mid-week of July. 



CHAPTER III 

The President's Visit to Russia 

DURING this period of excitement 
and of national demoralization, 
the head of the French Republic 
was conspicuously absent. As though 
to be safely out of the turgid plunge of 
things, President Poincare, it was thought 
by many, had purposely arranged to 
pay at this critical time a series of 
visits to certain courts. 

Future historians in describing the 
tragi-domestic episodes of the great 
trial, the chaotic conditions of French 
political life and the apparently unsettled 

20 



PRESIDENTS VISIT TO RUSSIA 21 

state of France — at this eventful period 
of her history — will pause, with a certain 
conscious rise of the pulse, when depict- 
ing the Presidential visit to Russia. Those 
writers gifted with the power of present- 
ing an historic pageant with brilliant 
effect will be furnished with adequate 
material. 

Beneath Russian skies magnificent 
fetes were being given. The Czar of all 
the Russias was entertaining in the grand 
manner of court ceremonials so rapidly 
passing away, his friend and ally Presi- 
dent Poincare. The enormous silhou- 
ette of the "France," bearing on board 
the French President, the Prime Minister, 
Monsieur Viviani and their suite, had 
slowly crept up, on a date destined to be 
of historic importance — on the 20th of 
July — had slowly made its way through 
a semi-cloud-burst to the haven of Cron- 



22 HEROIC FEAhCE 

stadt. At the moment of coming to 
anchorage the warm Russian sun 
flooded the gaily decked yachts, the 
cruisers and the steamers that crowded 
the waters as though to gild the impres- 
sive scene with a glow that should match 
the thundering welcome of the guns and 
the outburst of enthusiastic acclamations. 
At the moment of the meeting between 
the Czar and the President aboard the 
Imperial yacht, those thousands of Rus- 
sians crowding the shores burst in im- 
passioned joy into simultaneous chanting 
of the Russian hymn; and as the yacht 
"Alexandria" wended its way toward 
Peterhof, in both Russian and French 
ears there rang the equally stirring notes 
of the Marseillaise. 

During the Presidential visit, fetes and 
banquets were brilliant interludes to the 
graver business of the reviews of the fleet 



PRESIDENrS VISIT TO RUSSIA ^3 

and army and to the still weightier, more 
secret interviews of the heads of the two 
great states and of their ministers. 

No one present was more capable of 
appreciating, both as a man of many 
worlds and in the truest artistic sense, the 
picturesque splendor of this Russian wel- 
come than the French President. It 
has been said of him that "of all the 
French presidents, he is the first who is 
capable of judging a work of art from 
the artists' standpoint." The banquet 
tendered him by his Imperial host in the 
great hall of Peter the Great presented 
to the trained French eyes those con- 
trasts that mark our century's progress 
in a levelling of the classes. 

Against the fairy-like background of 
the famous Gobelin tapestries, pinks and 
gladioli repeated the dehcate bloom of the 
woven threads. Above the glitter of the 



M HEROIC FRANCE 

massive silver service there shone a 
circlet of prismatic lights flashing from 
crowned heads and jewelled necks such 
as this Russian court alone can boast. 
The Empress and her court ladies lent 
their Russian grace and beauty as though 
to offset the rugged, massively-built fig- 
ures of the Grand Dukes, Generals, 
Admirals, courtiers and grandees whose 
brilliant uniforms and jewelled orders 
rivalled the splendor of the ladies' toil- 
ettes. 

Three soberly-clad Frenchmen were the 
guests of honor. President Poincare's dull 
Republican black was relieved by the 
reds of the Grand Cordon of the Legion 
of Honor. Monsieur Delcasse's some- 
what coarsely-modeled, but vividly bril- 
liant face, instinct with the power of 
highly vitalized, intellectual forces; and 
Monsieur Vivani's plebeian but strongly- 



PRESIDENTS VISIT TO RUSSIA 25 

featured countenance rose above the 
blacks and whites of their evening dress — 
blacks and whites sharply contrasting 
with the splendor of court costumes and 
gold wrought uniforms. Dress has been 
proven to indicate character and to illus- 
trate historic periods. National and even 
ethical, as well as political movements — 
certain analysts find — are reflected in the 
dress of a people. Students of sociology 
would doubtless consider the Republican 
garb worn by the distinguished French 
guests at these imperial festivities indi- 
cative of triumphant democracy. 

One tries to imagine, indeed, such a 
scene as the one presented at that magni- 
ficent banquet, before 1870. The level- 
ling process begun in the assembling of 
the States General in Paris under the 
doomed Louis XVI was not to find its 
eventual triumph in an acceptance of the 



26 HEROIC FRANCE 

great principal that a free people may be 
as strong and as valuable — as an ally — 
as a nation still governed by monarchical 
rule until Republican France had proved 
to Europe its potential, as well as its 
financial value. Great principles for 
their lasting benefits must rest upon a 
secure and solid basis. The French Rev- 
olution entered upon its true reformatory 
work after Sedan. The slow rise of 
France to a new power as a people dates 
from its most humiliating defeat. 

From the political point of view, the 
presence of these three gifted Frenchmen 
at the Russian Court at this critical 
period of the Presidential visit was a 
fortunate circumstance. The work of 
the French Ambassador Monsieur Del- 
casse, at the Court of Petrograd, during 
the two years of his ambassadorial mis- 
sion had been of such incalculable bene- 



PRESIDENTS VISIT TO RUSSIA 27 

fit to French interests, to his country, as 
well as to the Franco-Russian Alliance 
that, as one of his admirers has said, 
"France will never know what it owes to 
Delcasse." 

To President Poincare the same trib- 
ute will eventually be paid. Possessed 
of the fighting quality of the soldier — 
he can review an army under fire and to 
the music of whistling shells, — Monsieur 
Poincare is endowed with intellectual 
powers of a high order. His public 
speeches are the speeches of a statesman 
and of a scholar. He has the French- 
man's charm of manner; and he possesses 
also that exquisite French tact that lights 
upon the right word as a bee upon a 
flower. In appearance, he owes little 
to physical advantages. Yet in bear- 
ing, in speech and in gesture, the 
French President conveys the impression 



28 HEROIC FRANCE 

of a certain distinction. The forces with- 
in have sculptured the physical envelope 
— ^have ennobled it. 

In the epoch-making meeting of the 
two allies whose united action, together 
with that of England and Belgium is to 
determine the future of Europe, and for 
years to come, we may be sure that the 
weight of Monsieur Poincare's personal 
influence, as well as the breadth of his 
political outlook will hereafter be made 
known. In every circumstance in life 
the personal equation plays its great role. 

The first disquieting rumors of a possi- 
ble war between Austria-Hungary and 
Servia were already disturbing the peace 
of European cabinets. The three dis- 
tinguished Frenchmen then gathered to- 
gether in the Russian capital were watch- 
ing with nervous, apprehensive gaze 
those danger signals Austria was uplift- 



PRESIDENTS VISIT TO RUSSIA 29 

ing before not only Servian, but Euro- 
pean eyes. 

The London TimeSy commenting on the 
"opportune presence of the French Presi- 
dent at the Russian court," said: 

"Monsieur Poincare's visit, at the 
moment when words of menace and de- 
fiance are being hurled across the shores 
of the Danube, is a happy circumstance. 
His visit recalls to all the powers the base 
on which rests the peace of Europe, and 
the risks that a conflict will surely entail. 
This visit is the answer to the preten- 
sions of certain Austrian polemics to the 
effect that the differences between Aus- 
tria and Servia interest them alone, and 
that an armed conflict between them can 
be localized. Austria-Hungary is a 
party to the Triple Alliance, and as such, 
she cannot engage in a dangerous quarrel 
without exposing her partners to obvious 



30 HEROIC FRANCE 

risks. We cannot believe that these 
three partners are disposed to allow them- 
selves to be dragged into difficulties with 
a Ught heart." 

With a light heart ! 

The words are freighted with sinister 
meaning. 

"The light heart" was not the heart of 
Austria beating in feeble pulsations in the 
breast of an octogenarian Emperor 
doubly enfeebled by age and sorrows, nor 
in that of his semi-indifferent people. It 
was in the heart of the Kaiser, of his un- 
ruly, headstrong and ambitious heir, and, 
as we now know, in the heart of the Ger- 
man people, carefully, methodically edu- 
cated and trained for this great moment, 
that there pulsed the bounding hope. The 
heart of all Germany was "Ught" indeed; 
it had been waiting for long years for this 
golden opportunity. On the old Emperor 



PRESIDENTS VISIT TO RUSSIA 31 

Francis Joseph's hesitating hand when 
at the last he showed signs of wavering, 
of accepting terms of surrender from 
Servia — the Kaiser's mailed fist bore 
down on that wavering doubt with the 
clutch of the destroyer about to be robbed 
of his victim. 

Meanwhile, the speeches interchanged 
between the Kaiser's "cousin" the Czar 
and President Poincare must have yield- 
ed interesting reading to an "honorable" 
Emperor already quietly mobilizing his 
large army, according to that convenient 
"Kriegsgefahrzustand" which permits 
Germany to mobihze without declaring 
her intention to do so. 

The assurances interchanged of the 
"confraternity which exists between our 
armies of the fleet and the field" as facili- 
tating that "ideal of peace, which inspires 
our respective countries, conscious of 



32 HEROIC FRANCE 

their forces;" the glasses Ufted to toast 
"the strength and durabihty of our 
proven aUiances, to preserve the equil- 
ibrum of Europe" — such noble sentiments 
must have evoked a pleased sense of grim, 
sardonic humor in the mind of the man 
who had already decided on a Romano- 
Germanic "conquest of the world." The 
Kaiser had also his ideal of peace; yes, 
but such peace as was to be purchased by 
the crushing and the massacring of half 
Europe, with promises of "happiness" to 
what remained of the maimed and ruined 
remnant. 



CHAPTER IV 

A German View of France 

AS all the world now knows, Germany 
did indeed believe herself to be as 
thoroughly possessed of full knowl- 
edge for gauging France's possible 
strength and her more than known 
weaknesses, as she was also assured of 
the complete preparedness of her own 
superb and supposed-to-be irresistible 
army. 

The world knows also the sources 
of this knowledge. 

Germany's spies had been as carefully 
selected for their base work as they 
had been skilfully placed that they might 

33 



34 HEROIC FRANCE 

penetrate into the whole frame-work 
of French life. 

Of late years many French families 
have found, with diminishing incomes, 
that a certain gratifying economy could 
be practiced by employing German ser- 
vants. French nature is singularly un- 
suspecting unless it has grounds for 
suspicion. In its attitude toward Ger- 
many's wide-spread spy system, it proved 
itself, indeed, amazingly naive. The 
modern. Republican Frenchman was act- 
ually incapable of divining the systematic 
working of a spy system sufficiently 
elaborate and sufficiently ignoble in 
spirit, to devise sending forth its ophidian 
mercenaries to crawl into the bosom of 
intimate family life, to eat their bread, 
and then betray them. 

The French housewife found in her 
German maid, nurse, or governess of 



A GERMAN VIEW OF FRANCE 35 

her children those docile, industrious 
and amiable quaUties with which, one 
must admit, German character is found 
to be endowed — when it is deemed 
expedient to make use of them — in 
a foreign country, under foreign 
pay. 

How could the confiding mistress 
divine that on entering her service, 
the German servant had received a list 
of directions that were, in reality, com- 
mands from the German headquarters 
of her Secret Service? Regular reports 
were to be made, by such servants, of 
any conversations likely to interest the 
home government; details appertaining 
to the income, to the expenditures, as 
well as to the family and social status 
of the French master and mistress in 
whose household the German servant 
had taken service — all such useful in- 



36 HEROIC FRANCE 

formation was to be regularly trans- 
mitted to headquarters. 

Amplify this system as it has been 
worked out throughout France, with 
Germans spying into the naval, military, 
official, political, urban and suburban 
life of a people — a system that even 
utilized the advertisements of its soups 
and foodstuffs for furnishing future 
accurate directions to an invading army 
of every road, lane, high-road and chateau 
throughout the length and breadth of 
France — ought not a people capable 
of organizing such a comprehensive 
scheme for possessing accurate knowledge 
of every secret of a neighbor state, feel 
confident of an easy baiting of an enemy? 

The Germans have proved themselves 
to be possessed of certain exceptionable 
qualities. Intuitive insight into the 
morale of another people or race, or a 



A GERMAN VIEW OF FRANCE 37 

broad, comprehensive view of race in- 
heritances, traditions and of processes 
of mental and spiritual development 
differing radically from their own, — 
such gifts have been denied the Germans. 
Goethe himself summed up a certain 
mental density in his own people when 
he said "the Germans take things 
heavily." 

German spies have infested for years 
the intimate and official life of all 
Europe and Great Britain. This spy 
system was only second, in point of 
organization and control, to that of 
the army. For long years reports re- 
lating to every grade and class of society 
and officialdom, of her foreign neighbors, 
and those she counted as enemies, have 
been pouring into the German head- 
quarters at Berlin. Yet no spy was 
able to predict what would be France's 



38 HEROIC FRANCE 

attitude as a nation when she was 
attacked. No German could divine the 
true spirit of the Frenchman when 
there was a national crisis before him 
to face. There was no magic baguette 
to prove how deep ran the national, 
patriotic stream of passionate devotion 
to soil and country. 

German baseness judged others capable 
of violating treaties, of accepting treach- 
erous offers — with bribes — of stooping 
to infamous alhance against weaker 
states, by its own standards. What 
spy in England could gauge the stainless 
honor of Sir Edward Grey? Where was 
the sound reasoning of her servants 
in Belgium, that could not even discern 
the glimmerings of that passionate love 
of national independence that made a 
German invasion of her soil rouse every 
Belgian to defend it.^ 



A GERMAN VIEW OF FRANCE 39 

From her own somewhat naive con- 
fessions adduced from the Kaiser's 
pompous speeches, and the many pre- 
dictions relating to the dates when 
certain cities were to be captured, as 
well as from the testimony of German 
prisoners, Germany's ignorance relating 
to France and her military preparedness 
is astounding. 

It was universally believed in Germany 
there was no great military genius to 
lead French valor, should her soldiers 
still be found to possess that older Gallic 
virtue. There was not even a Napoleon 
III. to rouse the national pride to 
suicidal bravery. And in point of equip- 
ment, the army was reported to be short 
of uniforms, of shoes even. Her stores 
of ammunition also were said to be 
ridiculously low. Crushing such an army 
was to be but an easy "walkover." 



40 HEROIC FRANCE 

On the 5th of August, therefore, certain 
German reservists residing in France 
were notified to join their regiment, 
not on German soil, but at Rheims. 
On the 15th of the same month, others 
were to assist in the triumphal entry 
of the German army into Paris, led 
by the Crown Prince, the Kaiser's won- 
derful son, whom God was to support 
''magnificently" in certain later victories. 
France was, therefore, considered as 
crushed before a gun was fired. She 
was thought to be in that friable state 
of decomposition that Venice was found 
to be in when Austria so easily sub- 
jugated her. At a touch of Germany's 
mailed fist the invertebrate Republic 
would crumble, as crumbles painted 
cardboard in an iron grasp. Germany, 
the whole nation, indeed, had been 
systematically trained to think of France 



A GERMAN VIEW OF FRANCE 41 

as at her lowest ebb, at the mercy of 
her hereditary instincts and inheritance. 
Degenerate, decayed, she had sunk to 
the lowest forms of vice. One needed 
but to make the tour of Montmartre 
after midnight or of her theatres, to 
witness exhibitions, — indecent, obscene 
— such as Berlin, in her somewhat 
grotesque efforts to rival Parisian de- 
pravity, had in vain attempted to imitate. 

Through her widespread spy system; 
through the reports of her ambassadors, 
who preferred to present only such facts 
as would be agreeable to the autocratic 
mind of the Kaiser, Germany believed 
she was also in complete possession 
of all the proofs of weakness, — inter- 
necine, political, and military — that 
placed England out of the great game. 

What an unhoped-for series of internal 
disturbances in both these hated coun- 



42 HEROIC FRANCE 

tries! How wonderously God, the only 
God, the God of WiUiam II and of 
Prussian destinies, had managed to com- 
plicate the political and domestic quarrels 
of France and England! Now was the 
long-awaited time to strike the great 
blow by this chosen man of God, 
the holier descendant of Alexander, of 
Caesar, — he who also had conquered 
Gaul, — and of Napoleon, whose chief 
military want of foresight was proven 
to have been his humiliation of Prussia, 
since from those bitter ashes had sprung. 
Phoenix-like, the resurrection of the 
mighty modern German Empire. 

Can we blame the Kaiser for beheving 
the finger of his God was pointing 
to the neutral frontier of Belgium as 
the open door to France? 

Beyond that door, France was sup- 
posed to be waiting in trembling, in 



A GERMAN VIEW OF FRANCE 43 

an agony of fear. Her hastily mobilized 
army might be galvanized into terror- 
stricken heroics by hysterical shouts of 
"a Berlin! a Berlin!" To Berlin, un- 
doubtedly, thousands of those abject, 
invertebrate creatures would go — but 
as prisoners of war. 

In less than a fortnight the perfection 
of German training of the superb army 
led by the great ''delight of the world" 
— her genius of an Emperor — would be 
proving to France what conquering power 
lay in a people, united, confident of 
possessing — "an excess of vigor, enter- 
prise, idealism and spiritual energy, 
which qualifies it for the highest places, 
for governing the whole world, in a 
word." 

Berlin would presently transform Paris 
into a highly moral play-ground for 
highly "cultured" Germans. Once this 



44 HEROIC FRANCE 

culture, "made in Germany," had time 
to work its spiritualizing methods, 
vicious, decadent France, after having 
been brought to its knees, would rise 
up a wiser, sadder people. In the new 
character of a reformed rake, her sal- 
vation would be hastened by the uplift 
of the new German "religion," — a reli- 
gion which is based on the oldest of all 
forms of despotism — that of systematic 
oppression. 



CHAPTER V 

The Assassination of Jaures 

AS THOUGH the fates were in con- 
spiracy to twist the threads of 
France's fortunes into still further 
hopeless entanglement, a second crime 
was committed in Paris whose conse- 
quences might have proved to be of the 
gravest possible results to national French 
unity. 

A pistol shot rang out on the night of 
July 31st, across a cafe table, in Mont- 
martre. 

Monsieur Jaures, the greatest of French 
Socialists and perhaps the most gifted 

45 



46 HEROIC FRANCE 

French orator since Gambetta, was seated 
in a corner of a cafe, the centre of a com- 
pany of friends. Two French deputies, 
Messieurs Longuet and Renaudel, the 
administrators of "L'Humanite" — the 
famous Sociahst paper — and Herr George 
Weill, the Socialist Deputy of the Reich- 
stag, were quietly discussing the stirring 
events of the day. The curtain screening 
the window close to which Jaures was 
seated was torn away from the outside. 
Two shots were fired point blank at the 
Socialist leader and Monsieur Jaures fell, 
unconscious, across the table on which a 
second before he had been leaning. His 
dead body a few minutes later was taken 
away by his friends. 

The power exercised by Jaures over the 
great body of French Socialists and Radi- 
cal-Socialists was due to a combination 
of gifts and qualities such as an advocate 



THE ASSASSINATION OF JAURES 47 



of ideas and principles destined to revolu- 
tionize society must possess to be ac- 
cepted as a leader of men. Jaures' 
career marked him from his first ap- 
pearance as a young man, teaching phil- 
osophy as early as 1883 at Albi — he was 
born at Castres, in the southern province 
of Taru, in 1859 — as a man with an as- 
sured future. His election as deputy for 
his province in 1885 gave him his first 
chance to prove his powers as an orator. 
At this period of his intellectual develop- 
ment, his opinions both on social and 
political matters were still in that some- 
what nebulous state peculiar to processes 
of mental transition. Eight years were 
to pass before Jaures was to come to com- 
plete understanding of his own fluctuating 
convictions, reflections and philosophic 
conclusions. Elected by the miners of 
Taru whose cause he had espoused dur- 



48 HEROIC FRANCE 

ing the famous Carmaux strikes, he pro- 
claimed to the spell-bound Chamber of 
Deputies in 1893, through the power 
wielded by a born leader of revolutionary- 
ideas and by an orator possessed of 
trained faculties and gifts of the highest 
order — his political attitude. His radical- 
ism all but touched the ground held by 
Anarchists. As a man, Jaures' deep- 
seated sincerity of character could not be 
doubted even by his enemies. 

Since his entrance into political life, 
Jaures unquestionably held the one 
stable, secure seat in that French Cham- 
ber too famous for sudden eclipse of 
power. Every Minister on entering into 
office knew he must reckon with Jaures. 
And behind the great leader there was the 
formidable, ever-growing army of the 
SociaUsts and the Radical-Socialists who, 
however much they might be divided by 



THE ASSASSINATION OF JAURES 49 

family quarrels, in moments of attack 
were united to a man behind the man 
who led them from victory to victory. 

Jaures' eloquence has been likened to 
that of Gambetta. 

The same richly colored, vibrant, son- 
orous phrases poured forth with southern 
impetuosity and fecundity, felicitous im- 
agery, and scholarly, classical allusion 
characterized the speeches of both these 
gifted sons of the Midi. Judged from 
the point of view of pure eloquence, 
Jaures was easily the most gifted orator 
France has produced since Gambetta. 
He could be answered; but his opponents 
found no weapons of defense or attack to 
equal that matchless gift that is the heri- 
tage of the great speaker. 

In the killing of Jaures, the assassin's 
crime had for its echo the startled cry of 
the civilized world. The ring of the 



50 HEROIC FRANCE 

murderer's bullet must have sounded as 
the last convincing note to assure Ger- 
many of France's complete demoraliza- 
tion. French Socialists, it was speciously 
argued, in their righteous anger at the 
committing of as heinous a crime, could 
now no longer be counted upon; to a 
man, they would refuse to obey their 
government's call to arms. 

Jaures' power, even after his death, 
was proved by the devotion of his follow- 
ers to their lost leader. 

The very night before the brutal assas- 
sination of Jaures, the French President 
had requested his presence at a meeting 
of some of the members of the Council. 
Jaures was then informed, some days be- 
fore the country was to know the worst, 
of what was surely to happen; of how poor 
a chance the negotiations going on in 
London promised for maintaining the 



TEE ASSASSINATION OF JAURES 51 

peace of Europe; of how tremendous 
would be the odds against France, in case 
of war, were she to be unsupported by 
England; and of what fate awaited the 
country were she not to present an un- 
divided front, to the dread enemy. 

"Every one of you Socialists must be 
with us," rang in Jaures' ears. 

Every Socialist, the great orator, the 
master-mind of his party instantly 
decreed, should fly to the colors. The 
awful prospect of France Prussianized, of 
a possible German Dictatorship was a 
spectre sufficiently terrifying to chill the 
blood of the man who, more than any 
other had preached Internationalism; 
who, more than any other had opposed 
the Three Years' Army Bill; who, more 
than any other had used his all but 
Demosthenian eloquence to stain the Lily 
of France with the blood of mistaken 



52 HEROIC FRANCE 

martyrdom. But once the great test 
applied, deep in the soul of every 
Frenchman there will be found the root 
of the patriot. 

That very night Jaures wrote his great- 
est article. In calling on his thousands 
of followers to rally to the flag, to answer 
to the bugle call of patriotism, he proved 
himself worthy to be ranked with heroes. 
He flung down the incendiary torch of the 
destroyer to unsheath the Periclean 
sword of the patriot. 

Socialists, Anarchists even, responded 
to a man to their great leader's impas- 
sioned appeal. 

The blow to Socialistic hopes that has 
been thus struck by French, and later by 
German, Russian and English Socialists, 
is a cruel one; the whole movement indeed 
it is openly acknowledged by Interna- 
tionalists, has been hard hit. Social- 



THE ASSASSINATION OF JAURES 53 

ists, in all the armies, are fighting each 
other like Nationalists. 

"In France the movement collapsed 
utterly, though only two weeks before 
the war the French Socialist party voted 
to recommend to an international con- 
gress to be held in Vienna, an inter- 
national general strike, in case of war. 
But war was declared too soon, and 
nothing came of the movement; Jules 
Guesde entered the cabinet together with 
Millerand to save the Republic and to 
fight against the traitor workmen of Ger- 
many," was a resume of the situation, in 
a socialist newspaper. 

The pregnant fact that behind the 
Socialist there lies the man — the elemen- 
tal, primitive human being — has been for- 
gotten by the Socialist Leaders. When 
one's wife, children, home, and the fruits 
of one's labor and toil stand in danger of 



54 HEROIC FRANCE 

being attacked, mutilated, looted and 
confiscated, a Socialist returns to his 
primal instincts. Peace doctrines are for 
peace times. 



CHAPTER VI 

The Week of Dread 

UNLESS one had lived in France 
during the eight days of dread 
and suspense before the actual 
declaration of war, it would be difficult 
to conceive of the tension among all 
classes of Frenchmen. 

Europe and Great Britain had been 
roused already to the fever point of 
excitement by the ultimatum addressed 
by Austria-Hungary to Servia. Its mean- 
ing could not be misunderstood. Its 
all but insulting demands meant war. 
Yet hope rose high with every varying 
phase of the peace negotiations. 

55 



56 HEROIC FRANCE 

Hope leaped high, indeed, when the 
announcement was made that Austria 
appeared to hsten, with an appearance 
of yielding, to Russia's proposals; not 
fear, but an enlightened dread of the 
awful consequences haunted the soul of 
every Frenchman when Servia's answer 
— remarkable alike for its temperance, 
its dignity and its acquiescent spirit — to 
Austria's all but insulting ultimatum was 
replied to by Austria's declaration of war. 

On every highroad, at every village 
cafe, at every dinner or luncheon, in 
villa or chateau throughout the length 
and breadth of France, passionate were 
the lengthy discussions, interrupted were 
all forms of pleasure or even of continuous 
labor. The very air was vibrant with 
intensified feeling. 

In my garden in Normandy during 
this long, anxious week, very little work 



TEE WEEK OF DREAD 57 

was done. The gardeners rested on their 
rakes or spades to make prolonged dis- 
cussion of the situation the easier; and 
their shears, I noticed, were chiefly used 
for effective, illustrative gesture. The 
chauffeur still burnished the brasses of 
his car, but more vigorous than his elbow 
work were the explosive prophesies of 
the punishment to be given the first 
German who offered his "gueule" for a 
target. The farmers busily cutting their 
grain went to the fields with the morning 
papers in their corduroy trousers' pocket. 
The genius of the French for clear 
insight; the talent everywhere displayed 
throughout all classes in France for 
clever handling of political situations, 
and the remarkable grasp of an intelli- 
gent understanding of broad national 
issues were never more conspicuously 
proven, and by all classes of French- 



58 HEROIC FRANCE 

men, than during that long week of 
suspense. 

The comparative strength of the armies 
of Europe was guessed with astonishing 
accuracy; the power of the various 
fleets was gauged; the destructive char- 
acter of German and French arms was 
weighed; but above all else, the question 
that hung aloft in the mid-air of misty 
conjecture was one fraught with nebulous 
doubt. 

Would England fight .^ 

That Russia would rush to the defense 
of her Slav interests and her Slav brethren 
was taken for granted. But England .^^ 

Her attitude was viewed with grave 
distrust. 

Whatever sense of security may have 
been felt by the heads of the French 
government, the French people to a 
man were skeptical of England's be- 



THE WEEK OF DREAD 59 

lieving her best interests lay with France. 
The usual stock phrases were mouthed; 
"Perfide Albion;" "We'll be crushed, 
pulling her chestnuts out of the fire." 
"Her King, when he was here, even he, 
when the President pressed him for a 
decisive answer to assert the closer 
knitting of the Entente Cordiale, could 
only reply, for mere courtesy's sake, in 
evasive phrases." 

France thus voiced her distrust of her 
neighbor across the Channel. There was 
a chill and a shudder that passed from 
one end of the country to the other; 
for were France to support, unaided, 
the full shock of the German armies, 
what might not be her fate.^^ 

When, on August 12th, through the 
pearly mists of early morning, those of 
us who could look out upon the gradually 
lighted dawn shining on the Havre 



60 HEROIC FRANCE 

seas to catch the first ghmpse of the 
Enghsh transports slowly making their 
way to harbor, what a thrill shot through 
the soul of every on-looker! The Calva- 
dos shores rang with welcoming shouts. 
The whole Norman coast was alive with 
breathless, excited multitudes. 

The vessels had crept up with the sil- 
ence and secrecy rather of foes than as the 
forerunners of the mighty English army 
that was to help France hold her own. 

Never was an ally more warmly met. 
Never were soldiers of two races so 
dissimilar, in traits and temperament, 
to fraternize as quickly. "Mon petit 
comrade" was the customary affectionate 
greeting of a diminutive French ''piou- 
piou," to an English Tommy nearly 
twice his size, as, linked arm in arm, the 
two would wend their way to cafe or 
to barracks. 



THE WEEK OF DREAD 61 

The real secret of this first landing of 
English troops was an open one to 
Havre, to Normandy and to Paris, many- 
days before the loyal English Press — 
pledged to guard the starting forth of 
the army — announced it to the English 
nation. 

The continuous coming of the English 
ships, thus unannounced, gave our 
modern Normandy world the startled 
surprise that must have been experienced 
by mediaeval or Renaissance peoples in 
the sudden appearance of succoring friend 
or war-like foe. 

In the case of this English ally, surprise 
was only exceeded by the quick joy, by 
the sense of an almost nameless gratitude 
in finding England living up to her best 
conceptions of high duty. Historians 
even now are darkening that bright 
picture by insisting England's fighting 



62 HEROIC FRANCE 

Germany on the rather thin plea of 
thus honoring her signature to a scrap 
of paper, is but a screen to veil her own 
more ambitious and destructive designs. 

Whatever revelations future historical 
records may have in store for us, the 
coming of the English troops to Havre, 
and later on to Ostend and to Boulogne, 
gave France her first profound thrill 
of cheer. She was not alone ! England 
and Belgium would, united with her 
own armies, assure ultimate victory. 
Her Russian ally would hold the German 
hordes in the East. 

France was under no illusions as to 
what was to come to her were she to 
be unsuccessful in her attempt to guard 
her own soil, and to protect her liberties 
unaided. As Alfred Capus so strikingly 
asserted in a leading article in the 
Figaro: "We had all seen, at one and 



TEE WEEK OF DREAD 63 

the same time — with a bhnding clarity 
had we seen — that with the formidable 
German horde descending upon us we 
must expect a return to barbarism. It 
is a barbarism which is waiting to 
reconquer and to throttle Europe, as 
the first invasions from the East de- 
scended upon the Roman world." 

Even before Germany's policy of 
terrorism and her long prepared, am- 
bitious project for world conquest had 
been as fully revealed to the nations 
as they have been within the past five 
months, the clear-sighted, analytic 
French mind had grasped the inner 
meaning and menace of the German 
invasion. 

It is one of the defective policies in a 
Republican form of government that 
the heads of the State cannot always 
act on knowledge gained through diplo- 



64 HEROIC FRANCE 

matic sources. That the French 
government had been warned, since or 
even before 1912, of Germany's war- 
Kke preparations and of her firm 
intention to invade France were she 
pushed by Russia's equally warhke 
preparations to break the long peace, is 
more or less an open secret. The only 
effective action that could be taken 
by France partially to prepare herself 
for Germany's dreaded attack, was to 
vote the Three Years' Army Bill. With 
her usual talent for distorting facts, 
Germany announced in the Reichstag, 
in 1913, when her Chancellor demanded 
an increase of both her war fund and 
her army, that France's threatening 
act in making the Three Years' Com- 
pulsory service a law made this demand 
imperative. Germany seems to ignore 
the teaching of one of the oldest of all 



TEE WEEK OF DREAD 65 

maxims — one that Lincoln phrased in 
his famous dictum that "You can fool 
all of the people some of the time, 
but you can't fool all the people all the 
time." In our day truth is the wisest 
of all policies, since through the press, 
the cable, the telegraph, the rapidity 
of swift displacement, and the publishing 
of the motley colored Yellow, Grey, 
Blue and White Books, the world may 
be immediately informed of facts that 
in former years patient historians de- 
voted their lives to unearthing. 

There are those — and they are many 
in America — who still contend France 
went into this war primarily because 
of her alliance with Russia. The terms 
of her treaty with her powerful ally 
exacted, it is true, the support of France 
in case of Russia going into a war. But 
the people of France — her fighting pop- 



66 HEROIC FRANCE 

ulation, her armies, in a word, felt and 
knew it to be her own war with Germany, 
France wanted war neither with Ger- 
many nor with any other nation. The 
long years of peace within her own 
territory had developed the delights 
and contentment peace breeds. The 
memories even of her humiliating defeat 
in 1870 had been softened by her 
subsequent victories in the field of 
diplomacy, by the increase of her com- 
merce, by her industrial prosperity, and 
by her financial importance. The longing 
to recapture her lost provinces — Alsace 
and Lorraine — was rather a desire colored 
by sentiment than one vibrating to 
the touch of revenge. The younger 
generation that had grown up to man- 
hood since Napoleon Ill's downfall 
could be roused to instantaneous en- 
thusiasm, it is true, at the call of patriotic 



TEE WEEK OF DREAD 67 

allusions to a possible recovery of the 
captured provinces; but this new France 
would have had to feel itself numerically 
twice or thrice as strong before a govern- 
ment could successfully be supported 
in any attempt to make war on Germany 
for the sole purpose of re-taking Alsace 
and Lorraine. 

That France as a whole nation fronted 
the possibility of war with dismay bord- 
ering on dread was sufficiently proved 
by her attitude during the tragic days 
when the so-called Peace negotiations 
were going on in London. At every 
turn of the diplomatic game France 
was alternately swayed by the fluctuating 
tides of hope and fear. 

These waves of passion-strung feeling 
had been intensified by the recent politi- 
cal, religious and socialistic crises through 
which the country had passed. The 



68 HEROIC FRANCE 

Caillaux trial; the absence of the head 
of the French government, during this 
period of stress and strain; and the 
assassination of Jaures — the great So- 
ciaHst Leader — ^had kept all France in 
a state of nervous and excited tension 
for a long fortnight before she was 
called upon to face one of the gravest 
situations in her historical experience. 

With Jaures assassinated, indeed, a 
conjunction of the planetary forces was 
felt, doubtless, to be in direct collusion 
with Germany's plans for the coming 
war that was "to be fought for the 
highest interests of our (her) country and 
of mankind." 

As yet neither France nor, indeed, had 
Europe become famiharized with these 
benevolent designs of a God-directed 
Emperor. 



CHAPTER VII 

France — The Living Sword 

IN one of the most eloquent calls to 
arms ever made by a chief of state to 
a nation, President Poincare thus 
addressed France, on Sunday, August 2d: 
*'In spite of the efforts of diplomacy, 
the situation in Europe within a few 
days has been aggravated. 

''The horizon has darkened. At the 
present moment most of the nations have 
mobilized their armies; even countries 
protected by neutrality have deemed it 
necessary to resort to this act as a pre- 
cautionary measure." 

69 



70 HEROIC FRANCE . 

The message went on to state that 
"one of the powers" had already mobil- 
ized, without issuing a decree of mobiliza- 
tion; that France who had always reiter- 
ated her desire for peace, who had during 
these tragic days given Europe counsels 
in moderation and a living example of 
wisdom, who had multiplied her efforts to 
maintain the peace of the world, now saw 
herseK forced to take preliminary meas- 
ures to safeguard her territory. 

After stating "that mobilization is not 
war" the President ended by saying that 
"I count on the sang-froid of this 
noble nation not to allow^ itself to be ex- 
cited by an unjustifiable emotion. I 
count on the patriotism of all French- 
men, and know that there is not one who 
is not ready to do his duty. 

"At this hour, there are no parties, 
there is a France — a France peace- 



FRANCE—TEE LIVING SWORD 71 

loving and resolute. There is a coun- 
try of right, of justice, proving its 
united spirit of calm, vigilance and 
dignity." 

This declaration was signed by all 
the Ministers as well as by the Presi- 
dent. 

All the world knows the response of 
France to that appeal. 

On the walls of every city in France, in 
every village, in every hamlet, the order 
of mobilization was posted. Every- 
where, throughout the length and breadth 
of the country, the same scenes were en- 
acted. Groups of men gathered thick 
about the posters, read their orders, and 
after interchanging remarks with the 
nearest neighbor, they would turn away 
silently with serious faces but with eyes 
aflame to carry the news to their fami- 
lies. 



72 HEROIC FRANCE 

In my parish of Vasouy the scene 
I witnessed only a few moments after 
the order was posted was a typical 
one. 

The diminutive Mairie of our parish of 
two hundred souls is perched on a rise of 
ground overlooking the sea. Adjoining 
the Mairie there stands a huge stone 
cross on its base of worn steps. 

About the railing of the Mairie, the men 
and women from the adjacent farms were 
thickly grouped. Children clung to their 
mother's skirts. Some of the fathers had 
the babe of the year sitting cross-wise on 
their shoulders; it was Sunday, and this 
call to arms had surprised many on their 
customary saunter along the Normandy 
highroad. 

"Ca y'est !" 

This was cried, almost in chorus, as 
the men looked — and stared. 



FRANCE— THE LIVING SWORD 73 

There was a moment's silence, and then 
a nervous laugh broke the stillness. A 
man near me — a farmer whose wife and 
child were beside me, called out through 
his hoarse laughter, ''Eh bien! — la grosse! 
I go to protect thee — it seems!" And he 
put his arm about the wife, whose eyes 
were filled with tears, but whose lips 
smiled — the brave smile! 

"Yes, that's it! We must fight for 
our children — ^for the country! What's 
your regiment? What arms do you 
use?" 

Every man forgot his momentary stag- 
ger of mingled surprise and consternation 
in eager discussion of his military rank 
and destination. There were hurried 
handclasps, a few Hurrahs! many cheer- 
ful "A bientot" — "A demains" and the 
groups separated, crying "Vive la 
France!" 



74 HEROIC FRANCE 

The women were as brave as calm. 
Only one or two showed traces of emo- 
tion. And one of them had cause for 
tears. "Thou'U never see the babe — 
Jules," a farmer's wife said, as she put 
her browned hand in her husband's. 

"Nonsense. I'll be bringing thee Ber- 
lin wools for a jacket in a month or two," 
was the gayly -voiced answer. 

Hour by hour that tide of courageous 
bravery rose higher and higher. It car- 
ried the men through the short twenty- 
four hours' preparation for an indefinite 
departure; it lifted the spirit of the man 
who must leave wife and children to an 
uncertain fate, to smile as he strained 
them in farewell; it drowned out all per- 
sonal interest; it swept all France into an 
exaltation of patriotic enthusiasm. It 
surprised even the most discerning of 
Frenchmen to discover such rare, such 



FRANCE— THE LIVING SWORD 75 

superb moral and spiritual qualities in 
their people. That a people so quick to 
feel, so intensely emotional, so danger- 
ously excitable should be capable of 
such sane common sense, of conforming 
immediately to strict disciphne, of be- 
ing possessed— as by magic— of a unified 
will, animated by a single and clearly 
understood purpose — this revelation of 
the France that had been developed dur- 
ing the forty years peace was as great a 
surprise to thinking Frenchmen as it was 
to be to the outer world. 

The trains carrying the men to their 
destination were garlanded with flowers; 
the scenes of farewell at the stations, 
heartrending though some were, were 
amazingly unemotional as a whole in 
outward expression. Women smiled into 
the smiling faces of lover or husband; 
fathers hfted children in their arms as 



76 HEROIC FRANCE 

though at play; even bent old peasant 
women, as they clasped son or grandson, 
in farewell, turned the tragedy into a joke. 

The mocking French spirit that so often 
hides deep feeling was indeed not wanting 
from certain scenes. 

A fine looking man, the clever Honfleur 
plumber, looking every inch the hero in 
his cuirassier's uniform, came along the 
Honfleur platform to entrain, his wife 
hanging to his arm. "Mon homme! 
mon homme! — thou goest from me!" the 
latter was wailing, between her bursting 
sobs. "Her man" looked on the bowed 
head, his indulgent smile half loving, 
half malicious. "Hum, it appears love 
is in the air — in the war-times. Thou 
were'nt as loving as all that yesterday 
morning when we had our quarrel!" 
But he strained her to his heart the 
moment after, before entering his car. 



FRANCE— TEE LIVING SWORD 77 

One might have thought the intermin- 
able Hne of cars rather decked for a gigan- 
tic wedding festivity than carrying sol- 
diers off to battle. 

Flowers were everywhere; diminutive 
squat bouquets flourished from the men's 
breasts and caps; branches of trees were 
tied to door handles; marigolds and 
phlox adorned the fillets into which provi- 
dent wives and mothers had crammed 
cigarettes and socks, bread and a 
change of underclothes — and also those 
unlovely but solacing bits of flannels 
— those merciful protectors of little 
Mary. 

The patriotic ardor that inspired the 
Japanese women during their heroic 
struggle with Russia to glory rather in 
the death of their beloved than to con- 
template their coming back defeated, 
thrills the heart of every French mother, 



78 HEROIC FRANCE 

of every wife who has seen son or husband 
sing his way to battle. 

"My wife wrote me, come home crip- 
pled, be brought back dead, but come 
home victorious" was quoted me, as 
the oft-repeated appeal of a Japanese 
wife to her husband, a hero of Port 
Arthur. 

This Spartan courage was matched by 
the spirited outburst of a certain countess 
who stood beside me on the platform of 
the Honfleur station. We were watch- 
ing the long train slowly winding its way, 
bearing the first soldiers entrained in our 
region of Calvados. The lady's two sons 
were bending half out of the car window, 
striving to catch the last glimpse of the 
upright figure beside me. My friend's 
cheeks were white with grief and the in- 
ward dread she would not voice. But 
her lips and voice were firm. 



FRANCE— THE LIVING SWORD 79 

*'If only they come back victorious," she 
said, and she turned to put her arm about 
the bowed form of a peasant woman, who 
was furtively wiping the tears coursing 
down the bronzed cheeks. ''Allons, la 
mere — we must save our tears for the day 
when crying will be our only comfort." 

She walked the old woman off to her 
char-a-banc, knowing action is grief's 
best anodyne. 

Before the train had left the station, 
some of the soldiers had burst into 
snatches of song. One by one, the men 
took up the familiar notes. That stirring 
call "AUons, enfants de la Patrie" soon 
swung into air, a thunderous shout. Tri- 
umphant, exultant — for are not the chil- 
dren of France at last marching to their 
long-awaited revenge for Sedan? that 
swelling chorus has been ringing up to 
French skies for long months: from Mar- 



so HEROIC FRANCE 

seilles to Calais, from the French Vosges 
to the rock-bound coast of Brittany, as 
on one memorable day Paris heard it, a 
continuous song from the Bastile to the 
Arc de Triumphe. That melodious mili- 
tant music has swept the sensitive, 
emotional harp of French feeling, striking 
the mighty patriotic chord that has made 
all France one. 

This spirit of meeting a grave crisis 
with confident gayety, has not deserted 
the French soldier at the front. His 
raillery, his talent for seeing the humor- 
ous side of a situation, his quick wit is the 
leaven that makes light of even the hor- 
rors of life in the trenches. 

The women left at home have shown 
since the war began a Lacedemonian 
courage. They have stepped into the 
vacant places as though born to the task 
of the running of a farm alone, unaided. 



FRANCE— THE LIVING SWORD 81 

or of a hotel, or the direction of the family 
fortunes. No task seems to be beyond 
their capacity or power of adaptation. 
Every woman in France is now working. 
She turns her hand to whatever duty or 
task lies before her. 

When the horses, carts and vehicles of 
all sorts were requisitioned, along the 
country roads women old and young, 
girls even, led many of the horses from 
the farm or the spirited teams from their 
master's stables to the judging posts. 
One might have thought one's self at 
Longchamps, or in the paddock of the 
Deauville race-course. All was as order- 
ly, as composed, as though every valuable 
horse had his master or coachman as 
showman. 

The Frenchwoman among the working 
classes is trained for service of some sort. 
To take the command of a household, of 



82 HEROIC FRANCE 

a business even, is only in many instances 
a case of promotion. The dot system in 
France has given women equal interests 
in the management of the family fortune. 
She steps as easily into the place of power 
as she understands how not to appear to 
usurp it. The Frenchwoman of the low- 
er middle and peasant or working-wom- 
en's class I believe to be the most com- 
pletely equipped woman in our modern 
society. 

It is she who will silently, prudently, 
untiringly repair by her industry and 
thrift the disastrous devastation caused 
by the war. 

The magnificent courage she is now 
showing proves her training — and her 
piety. The Frenchwoman is the scab- 
bard of what Michelet called France — 
"The living sword." 



CHAPTER VIII 

Paris When the Germans were at Compiegne 

AT certain crises in the life of a 
nation, the slow deposit of the 
years necessary to forge new forces 
in character proves the results attained. 
The spirit animating modern Frenchmen; 
the gain in self-control; the power of 
acting with an American initiative; and 
the newborn respect for authority — 
when such authority is felt to exercise 
its right to safeguard the nation — all 
these fine qualities that have been 
slowly crystallizing during the past forty 
odd years were conspicuously displayed 

83 



84 HEROIC FRANCE 

during the panic in Paris, when the Ger- 
mans were known to be at Gompiegne. 

During the three or four days of fUght 
of a miUion or more Frenchmen, women, 
and the foreigners still left in Paris — 
that city may be said to have been, 
indeed, in a state of panic; but it was 
a most orderly, civilized panic. There 
was hurry, but no confusion: there was 
the tremor of uncertainty born of dread, 
but there was no fear displayed: there 
was tearful farewells; but those who 
were condemned to remain in Paris — 
possibly to endure a long siege — showed 
the braver face; even at the stations, 
the chorus was "Au revoir!" "A bientot!" 

The larger part of the well-to-do were 
indeed, in flight; but one might have 
thought these Parisians were only in a 
greater haste than common to hurry 
to the sea-coast for the September out- 



THE GERMANS AT COMPIEGNE 85 

ing — that chosen hoHday season "pour 
les petites bourses, qui eherchent les 
petits trous pas ehers." 

I went up to Paris, on August 29th, 
from my country place in Normandy. 
Paris, I found on my arrival, presented 
an entirely new face. Streets and boule- 
vards were all but deserted. Most of 
the shops were already closed. One 
passed drawn shutters and tightly-locked 
iron doors, on which one read "ferme 
pour cause de mobilisation." The Rue 
de la Paix looked a graveyard of finery. 
The Champs Elysees could not be 
crossed, at any hour of the day or night, 
without the uncanny sense of its being 
a death-trap. The few passers-by one 
met eyed one with curious, intent gaze; 
in every foreigner Parisians saw a 
possible German spy. Could one blame 
them.f^ 



86 HEROIC FRANCE 

A single, friendly gesture, however, 
could disarm suspicion. I remember 
hurrying down a side street near the 
Arc de L'Etoile: I was reading the 
headlines in Le Temps' single sheet. A 
certain paragraph arrested my attention. 
I stopped. A voice at my elbow asked, 
in gentle tones: 

"II y a des nouvelles — Madame.^" 
The face that was lifted to mine with 
its anxious eyes and grave, controlled 
lips told its story. Here was a mother 
or wife, with her beating heart, close 
beside me. As I read on to that gentle- 
faced lady, one by one the passers-by 
stopped — drew near to listen. When 
the audience grew to the somewhat 
terrifying number of fifteen or more, I 
passed the newspaper to an elderly 
gentleman. I had been fortunate in 
my choice The gentleman possessed a 



THE GERMANS AT COMPIEGNE 87 

nicely modulated voice; the resonant 
tones seemed to amplify the meagre 
lines of the official communique to a 
reassuring fullness. When he stopped 
and passed me the sheet, his bow — as 
he lifted his hat — might have been the 
recaptured grace of lost eighteenth cen- 
tury manners. 

The little circle lingered on. Everyone 
spoke to their nearest neighbor. The 
confessed advance of the German army, 
by the government — as far as Soissons 
— ^was gravely discussed. A burly grocer, 
his white apron and huge basket poised 
on his head, proclaimed two patent facts ; 
that his "garcons" were at the front and 
that he, the patron, obviously over age, 
was his own errand boy. This portly 
individual announced ''The Germans will 
never get to Paris: our forts are the 
strongest in the world." 



88 HEROIC FRANCE 

"They're twenty-five miles beyond the 
city," cried exultingly a lad in his early 
teens, a cigarette dangling between his 
rosy lips to prove his long smoking 
habit. 

"If only they respect our monuments," 
was the contribution of an elderly matron 
of serene aspect. She, perhaps, had 
memories of 1870 to nurse a belief 
Germans were still gentlemen of the 
nobler type of the Von Moltkes, and of 
the first German Emperor's period. 

"Ah — the fighting there'll be before 
the forts!" The gentle-faced lady's voice 
sounded like a knell. Its accents of 
subdued dread and sadness told on the 
little crowd. She bore unflinchingly 
the eyes that instinctively were turned 
on her; she responded to the unuttered 
sympathy she felt rising about her. 
With a smile touchingly sweet, but 



THE GERMANS AT COMPIEGNE 89 

one bereft of life or joy, that was like 
a courtesy in its comprehensive sweep, 
she went her way. As I watched the 
outlines of the tall shapely frame melting 
into the tender greys of the Paris street, 
the droop of the slender shoulders, the 
controlled dignity of the step, and the 
bent head seemed to symbolize future 
womanhood in France. Thus would it 
meet its coming bereavement with accept- 
ed resignation, — lighted by a smile. 

For two days Paris lived on in this 
unnatural calm. Its effect on the mind 
was that of the stupefying, slumberous 
monotony of a provincial town. The 
million or more of soldiers who had 
passed through Paris from the provinces 
to the front had long since been en- 
trained. There was still some show of 
animation at the Gare du Nord and at 
the other stations; supplies, horses, guns 



90 HEROIC FRANCE 

and ambulance stores were continually 
sent on to follow the armies. But the 
life of the Paris streets was as sluggish 
as that of a dammed stream. Even the 
"Ouvroirs" — the shops opened by ladies 
to supply idle working girls and women 
with means of livelihood — were pathetic 
spectacles. I can still recall the deep- 
voiced cry of a gabereen-garmented mer- 
chant of unguents in the bazaar at 
Constantinople: "Where, O Lord, where 
are the buyers.^" The accents were 
freighted with a biblical intensity. 

The serious-faced French women, seat- 
ed behind the overflowing ''Ouvroirs" 
counters might well have echoed that 
lament. The shops were full of chiffon 
fineries, but empty. There were no 
buyers left in Paris. 

The life of Paris — its gaiety, its bril- 
liance, its yield of rich and picturesque 



TEE GERMANS AT COMPIEGNE 91 

contrasts, its multiform activities were 
all as dead — as much a part of past 
memories — as though the great city had 
been stricken by some new form of 
paralysis. 

On Sunday, late in the afternoon of 
August 31st, Paris, as by a miracle, woke 
up. She became, almost in an hour, as 
though electrified by a dynamic shock 
that stirred her to her very vitals. The 
Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the Champs 
Elysees, the broad avenues and tributary 
smaller streets were suddenly choked 
with rapidly moving vehicles of all sorts. 
Through all that long, mild August night 
and for the following three or four days 
strange were the sights one looked upon. 
The great thoroughfares were a phan- 
tasmagoria, a packed, conglomerate mass 
of automobiles, ambulance wagons, aero- 
planes, cars, auto-taxies — the latter 



92 HEROIC FRANCE 

crowded to the last limit of space — and 
of motor trucks filled with soldiers or 
with guns. Had the familiar sign in 
England been the. label attached to 
hundreds of the automobiles — "Families 
Removing" — one might the better have 
comprehended the heterogeneous gather- 
ing of live-stock, pets, and human beings 
filling the cars. Trunks and band- 
boxes were crowded into the interior of 
automobiles; ladies were clutching tiny 
dogs, and children were gravely holding 
dolls or a bird-cage. I saw a cat and 
her kittens contentedly sharing the broad 
lap of a ''nou-nou," while her sleeping 
charge lay crosswise on her arm. Such 
was the odd assortment one might see 
perched on the top of a hat-box, or 
crowded together on the closed hood of 
a landaulet — ^to give the more room for 
luggage. 



THE GERMANS AT COMPIEGNE 93 

What curious change had transformed 
Paris? Had the order come from the 
Minister of War for demoHtion of more 
houses in the danger zone, about Paris? 
Was this agitation proof of a new, a 
more serious trouble? Was Paris itself 
in danger? 

Paris! 

As one's eyes travelled down the 
length of that great stretch of verdure 
we know as the Champs Elysees; of 
its grey-faced facades, — ^^of that street 
that is a city in itself, with its theatres, 
cafes, children's playground, hotels, the 
private houses with their sculptured doors 
and windows, its shops and palaces — 
the street that begins its existence to the 
music of the playing fountains, to end 
it in the majestic Arc de I'Etoile — the 
whole in perfect drawing — could one 
look upon the Champs Elysees bathed 



94 HEROIC FRANCE 

in the glow of an amber sunset, and not 
have one's heart seem to miss its beat, 
as one thought of this playground of 
all the world in danger of vandal 
desecration? 

It was at a little restaurant in the 
Avenue Victor Hugo that the explana- 
tion of the sudden revival of life in the 
Paris streets was given us. 

We were three who sought the bril- 
liantly Ughted interior of a restaurant 
one had passed hundreds of times and 
had never noticed. The same was doubt- 
less true of the motley crowd that filled 
the tables. One recognized the faces 
f amiharized by watching them at dinners 
or suppers at the Ritz-Carlton, at Giro's, 
or at Paillard's. There were several of 
those elderly gentlemen who line the 
red benches of every good eating-house in 
the French capital. A few had brought 



THE GERMANS AT COMPIEGNE 95 

their wives and daughters. There was 
a group of French soldiers in uniform; 
among them was an officer, whose clang- 
ing sword and shining spurs created 
a distinct impression on a bevy of those 
* 'little ladies" (who are so often the 
reverse of little), and without whom no 
French restaurant, even in war times, 
would be complete. The attention of 
all the tables was immediately con- 
centrated on the group that symbol- 
ized to every Frenchman present, army, 
flag and country. One almost expected 
to hear the murmurous exclamations 
break out into an ''Hurrah!" or a si- 
multaneous chanting of the Marseillaise. 

The handsome young soldiers present- 
ly suffered an eclipse of popular favor. 

The glass doors of the cafe were 
suddenly thrown open; a crowd of 
well-dressed, but somewhat strangely 



96 HEROIC FRANCE 

appareled gentlemen and ladies attracted 
every eye. The prominent figure of 
the group was that of one of the Foreign 
Ministers. This latter gentlemen was 
at once surrounded. One of the gentle- 
men of our party returned from greeting 
the Minister with a rather fixed smile 
and the air of a man charged with news. 

"We know now the secret of what 
has happened to Paris," he said quietly, 
as he spread his napkin. 

"The Germans are at Compiegne." 

At that startling announcement the 
champagne seemed to stop sizzling. 
Those at the tables nearest us were 
still — rigid with intensity of interest. 

The Minister, our friend went on, had 
been visiting some friends at Compiegne. 
Many of those assembled at the Chateau 
had been playing tennis. Bells were 
heard suddenly ringing throughout the 



TEE GERMANS AT COMPIEGNE 97 

town. Cries in the streets deafened the 
ear: 

"The Germans are coming!" 

"Les Boches sont la, sauvez-vous! 
sauvez-vous!" 

The sinister cry rang out hke a death- 
knell throughout the city. 

"The ladies, it appears, took time 
only to secure their jewels. Everything 
else was left behind in that superb 
chateau — there will be some rich looting! 
People were in their cars in a few 
seconds. Nothing was thought of but 
fhght. Those who could not command 
an auto have been forced to remain. 
Such is the strength of the advancing 
German army — his Excellency tells me 
he could hear the tramping, the steady, 
persistent tramping of the army along 
the resonant macadam, as they them- 
selves stopped for a second or two 



98 HEROIC FRANCE 

outside of the town. Yet the Germans 
were still several miles away." 

Again, after the first gasp of amazed 
horror, the clutching thought came — 
Paris! Would the forts hold.^ Was 
the Paris army ready for its great task.^^ 
Would those destroyers — the great Ger- 
man siege guns — reduce Paris, spoil its 
lovely face, its modernized, Athenian 
beauty — as Liege had been all levelled 
to a dust-bin, to ashes .^ 

The last laughter one was to hear 
in Paris for many a day was that 
which had greeted the entrance of the 
soldiers. All the tables were silent 
enough now. There was a perfect com- 
posure and calm; but mirth had died 
out in the hearts of these Parisians. 

The stars in the Paris sky that 
night, as we slowly walked homeward, 
were blurred. The shadow of fear 



TEE GERMANS AT COMPIEGNE 99 

seemed to have crept into the darkened 
streets. The ear was haunted by the 
threatened tramp, tramp of that men- 
acing army. Did Rome hear the feet 
of the hurrying miUions of Huns, rushing 
onward to annihilate its splendor.^ Was 
Paris, the richest jewel of beauty on 
all this ever-turning, ever changing world, 
to have its glory blotted out, by these 
later Vandals from the North .^^ 

The awful spectre of fear came out 
of the fastnesses of the night and loomed 
large, laying down beside one, close to 
one's pillow. Never had a fate as cruel, 
as unjust, as unrelenting in its de- 
structive possibilities been seen with 
clearer vision. 



CHAPTER IX 

Paris on the Eve of Capture 

WITH the thrilling news that the 
German armies were at Com- 
piegne, only fifteen miles distant 
from the capital, the whole city, as we 
have seen, had been thrown into a state 
of panic. That precipitous fhght of over 
a million, in two days' time, to the inter- 
ior of the country towards Tours, towards 
Normandy, towards the coast or Bor- 
deaux, was the happier lot, as I have 
said, of the comparatively favored few. 

What of the milhons left behind? What 
was to be their fate? What hopes, fears, 

100 



PARIS ON EVE OF CAPTURE 101 

apprehensions filled the minds of per- 
haps the most sensitive, intelligent, 
imaginative people of any modern 
capital? 

As hour after hour passed, between the 
dates of August 31st and that day in 
early September when Paris awoke to 
learn the army of General von Kluck was 
retreating, not an inhabitant of the 
French capital but had passed through 
the varying phases common to passion- 
wrought emotion. The heart and mind 
of every Parisian were alternately wrung 
by an anguish of fear, of awed dread, as 
they also leapt to the sudden, uplifting 
hope that, at the worst, Paris might be 
called upon to sustain a long siege, as was 
the case in the war of 1870. It was 
known throughout the city that all the 
houses within a certain radius in 
the suburbs had already been razed, 



102 HEROIC FRANCE 

orders having been issued some days 
before. 

The sad-faced, bewildered looking 
procession of the dispossessed had begun 
to pass into the city from the danger 
zones between the outer forts and Paris. 
The tightening grip of dread seemed to 
clasp the closer every Parisian who looked 
on the passing carts, laden donkeys, 
weary foot-passengers, and desolate-eyed 
women — the latter seated in the midst of 
hastily packed, heterogeneous masses of 
household goods in every variety of ve- 
hicle. Here was the stricken advance 
guard flying before the army of occupa- 
tion, terribly significant of what Paris 
might have to suffer, might surely have 
to face. 

Were the expected siege to be a long 
one — well — ^Paris, it was confidently as- 
serted, at least would not starve. Her 



PARIS ON EVE OF CAPTURE 103 

stores of supplies were said to be all but 
inexhaustible. And, for a long while, 
there would be the rich open coun- 
try towards the South, from which to 
draw supplies. No, Paris would not 
starve. There would be no necessity laid 
upon her of looking forward to the time 
when horse-meat would be considered a 
luxury, and a rat would sell as high as a 
hare in peace days. There might not 
always be a chicken in the pot; but one 
could confidently count on the appetizing 
leek and a bit of a toothsome joint. And 
of salads — that crisp vegetable and bever- 
age in one — there would be no end. 

Thus Paris gossiped and talked — and 
shivered. For it is certain that, what- 
ever might have been the knowledge 
possessed by those in authority as to the 
protective strength and resources of the 
forts and the army, the people of Paris 



104 HEROIC FRANCE 

were as ignorant of what efforts were be- 
ing made to save the city as was the 
country at large. 

For years France had been convinced 
the forts surrounding Paris could never be 
taken. But the wide range of the huge 
German siege guns and their destructive 
effects on Belgian towns had demolished 
the hopeful theory that those outer forts 
would hold before a single German gun- 
man had taken up his position to sight 
his guns on Paris. If the forts could not 
withstand the invader's guns, what was 
left? What hope was there of the armies 
of General Joffre, of the English army, 
holding off the rapidly approaching 
hordes of the Germans.^ If the enemy 
could get as near to Paris as Compiegne, 
what was to prevent their triumphant 
on-rush to Paris? 



PARIS ON EVE OF CAPTURE 105 

Besides the dreaded hordes of the **bar- 
barians" — hordes it was well known now 
were as destructive, as cruel, as remorse- 
less in their methods of warfare as were 
the conquering Huns in their wanton 
despoiling of the Roman capital, as 
pictured to us by historians — besides 
the ruthless German armies, there were 
other horrors to be feared. A raid of the 
Zeppelin fleets sailing the skies might 
wreck what was left of Paris after 
the monster siege guns had trained their 
fire on architectural masterpieces and 
had made the Paris streets a burial- 
ground of wrecked homes and ruined 
civic buildings. 

Was Paris to suffer the destruction al- 
ready meted out to Liege, to Namur.^ 
The thought of what fate held in store, 
perhaps, for this City of Beauty, — for the 
city that lures the civilized world, as 



106 HEROIC FRANCE 

Athens charmed the antique world — this 
possibihty of evil coming to her, made 
every passerby along the strangely silent 
streets — the hurrying, elderly postman; 
the painted, professional seekers of men, 
anxious-eyed now, wistful, of doubly 
pathetic aspect; the belated suburban, 
hastening to his train; the sHpping, fur- 
tive shapes of tramps; and the shop- 
keepers, gloomily shutting down windows 
whose wares had tempted no buyers, — 
every man or woman seemed to assume 
new, enormous value. Any and all might 
be called upon to face heroic situations — 
might be starved or tortured or imprison- 
ed, might see one's best beloved wounded 
or killed before one's eyes. The sluggish 
air seemed charged with this tragic men- 
ace. 

At all times Paris has an atmosphere 
peculiarly its own. The light, buoyant 



PARIS ON EVE OF CAPTURE 107 

air conveys the impression of being 
charged with certain psychic forces, as 
though the milHons of men and women 
who have Uved, suffered, dreamed, 
worked and conquered for all the long 
centuries of its eventful Ufe were still 
fluttering, hovering above, inspiring 
those who continue their work. On this 
last night of August, the ghosts of those 
who had fought, had bled, had incited to 
riot, had struck at kings, had tortured 
their queen, had fired palaces, or had 
gone down to heroic death in defense of 
the great city, — these shapes surely peo- 
pled the warm, thick night, starless, 
moonless, surcharged with suggestive 
memories. 

The city, as a city, appeared to be ac- 
cepting its fate with the despairing atti- 
tude of the already conquered. Those in 
authority seemed strangely, unaccount- 



108 HEROIC FRANCE 

ably apathetic, inactive. What was hap- 
pening? Was Paris to be allowed su- 
pinely to suffer the fate of Brussels? 
Was no effort to be made to save her? 
What was the Governor of Paris doing? 
He seemed as helpless, confronted by this 
monstrous calamity, as a new-born babe. 
Where was Joffre — the saviour of French 
valour? Had those in power lost all 
sense of responsibility? Had even the 
bravest suffered a paralysis of energy, at 
this appalling imminence of the conquest 
of Paris? Surely, at the last, a miracle of 
salvation would come to pass and Paris 
would be saved. 

Thus was the heart of every Parisian 
alternately rocked by the fluctuations of 
hope and fear. 

Meanwhile, as with the on-sweeping 
rush of a destructive fate, three German 
armies were apparently swiftly, irresisti- 



PARIS ON EVE OF CAPTURE 109 

bly attempting to envelop the approaches 
to the great French capital. 



CHAPTER X 

How Paris was Saved 

THE corps of the German army of 
invasion destined to capture Paris 
was composed of three principal 
armies. One, commanded by the Crown 
Prince, formed the left wing. General 
von Bulow was in the center and General 
von Kluck commanded the right wing. 
This latter army had crossed the whole 
of Belgium. It had been necessary for 
it to space (echeloner) its posts of sup- 
plies. Von Kluck's army had in front 
of it the English army, commanded 
by General French, of what remained 

110 



HOW PARIS WAS SAVED 111 

of his 80,000 men. Future historians 
who will describe this campaign will 
say, without doubt, that the admirable 
march forward on Paris executed by 
General von Kluck was only surpassed 
by the brilliant retreat of General French 
from Mons. 

Faithful to the great principles of Ger- 
man strategy, General von Kluck's con- 
stant endeavor was concentrated on his 
attempt during the whole of his forward 
march to turn the left wing of the Eng- 
lish army. This latter army, commanded 
by General French, lacked a base. The 
army of General Percin would have been 
at this moment, of inestimable succor. 
But Percin, as we shall presently see, 
was already on his way to Rouen. 

With General von Kluck on his left, 
pressing him, harassing him, seeking for 
every point of vantage, the skill which 



112 HEROIC FRANCE 

places General French high among the 
military strategists consisted in never 
for one instant allowing his left wing to 
be turned, an error that would have been 
fatal to the armies of the Allies. He was 
thus able to preserve during the whole 
course of his retreat a position parallel 
with that of his initial position. 

It appears that at the time the German 
army had advanced as far as Compiegne, 
some scouts were sent on in advance. 
Their report to General von Kluck had 
been satisfactory. The Commander-in- 
Chief felt assured a forward movement 
on Paris was safe. General von Kluck 
had with him an army of x x x x men, 
all in perfect condition. The attendant 
fleets of aeroplanes, of Zeppelins and the 
convoys of big siege guns were ready. 

The advance began. The army that 
had marched through Brussels, that 



HOW PARIS WAS SAVED 113 

had fought and conquered Belgium 
and had entered and taken possession of 
Compiegne, was made ready for the great- 
est capture of all — for the taking of the 
coveted prize of Paris! How loudly beat 
the heart of every German soldier! How 
the voices rang up, shouting "Deutsch- 
land iiber AUes!" to the hated French 
skies. The conquering army's sweep- 
ing, victorious columns were soon to 
prove to Paris, to France, to all the 
world, the promised word of the Kaiser 
— come true. The armies would be in 
Paris in a day, in a few hours, to 
teach Paris and Parisians the lesson 
they had taught Brussels, that they 
had taught all Belgium — that those who 
dared defy Germany must suffer as Bel- 
gium had suffered. Were Paris to resist, 
were her forts to belch forth their fire, 
Paris would be levelled with the dust. In 



114 HEROIC FRANCE 

the heart of many a German soldier the 
hope leapt high that Paris might be fool- 
hardy enough to make her cannon talk. 
Such suicidal patriotism would mean but 
larger booty. The sacking of Paris! The 
souls of Germans shook with the rap- 
ture of covetous greed at that prospect. 

The while, the German columns kept 
marching on. This was one side of the 
great historic picture. 

On the other side of this tragic situa- 
tion there was Paris. 

In Paris itself during this period of pro- 
tracted anxiety for the safety of the city, 
the accusation was seriously made against 
Monsieur Hennion, Prefet de Police, and 
General Michel, Governor of Paris, of 
having insisted the government should 
declare Paris an open city that it 
might be spared the horrors of bom- 
bardment. 



HOW PARIS WAS SAVED 115 

Whether or not this accusation can be 
sustained or denied in the later, fuller 
knowledge of the situation, it is certain 
the ail-but immediate changes insisted 
on by General Joffre support the above 
indictment.* 

On learning the situation in which 
Paris found itself, General Joffre rose to 
the great emergency with the resourceful 
energy of a born military genius. He 
decided instantly on learning the appal- 
ling news of the rapid advance of the 
German army that Paris should at 
least attempt a vigorous resistance. The 
city should not see its glorious escutcheon 
blackened by the disgrace of facile con- 
quest. 



* It has been stated, and the report is currently believed that 
Lord Kitchener came over to Paris at this critical time, and that 
when in council with General Joffre, certain very drastic measures 
were threatened in case Paris was undefended. These reports lack 
official affirmation. 



116 HEROIC FRANCE 

The General made one of the most 
spirited rushes from the front to Paris, 
ever known in automobile records. On 
his arrival, without losing an hour's time, 
with his quick insight immediately dis- 
cerning the points of weakness in the 
grave situation, he obtained a swift 
change in both the Prefecture and the 
Governorship of Paris. General Michel 
was replaced by General Gallieni, the 
already famous General who had given 
signal proofs of energetic resources, not- 
ably in the governing of Madagascar. 

General Joffre's next action was to 
perform the impossible. 

In forty-eight hours he had assembled 
an army of more than 300,000 men prin- 
cipally composed of men belonging to the 
regiments stationed in the suburbs of 
Paris, and to the garrisons of towns in the 
provinces already invaded. This hastily 



HOW PARIS WAS SAVED 117 

united army certainly had no great 
military value. It was nevertheless this 
army that, without firing a single shot, 
saved Paris. 

While Paris was being thrilled with the 
new courage born of the knowledge that 
the great commander was actually in the 
city, in command of an army that had 
risen out of the very earth as it seemed, 
since no one knew whence it had come; 
was being uplifted by the buoyant hope 
that Paris might be saved; since what 
miracle might not its new governor, the 
renowned General Gallieni, perform, and 
with the genius of General Joffre to guide 
him? — the latter was about to startle 
Paris by the working of a miracle indeed, 
and one accomplished by a most seem- 
ingly commonplace measure. 

With a rapidity of conception which 
history will preserve as long as history 



118 HEROIC FRANCE 

lasts, General Joffre was to prove he 
knew how to take advantage, and in the 
most admirable way, of the fatal blunder 
committed by the enemy. 

Paris on a certain day in early Septem- 
ber woke up to the fact that something 
extraordinary was happening. At the 
corner of every street policemen stop- 
ped automobiles, taxi-cabs and private 
carriages. The occupants of these vehi- 
cles were peremptorily ordered to de- 
scend. The drivers in their turn were 
given directions to rush at full speed to 
the barracks of the Zouaves. These 
Zouaves then constituted the flower of 
the army of defence for Paris. General 
Joffre was about to attempt one of the 
most desperate ventures ever essayed by 
a great strategist. 

Meanwhile, General von Kluck on 
leaving Compiegne the day before had 



HOW PARIS WAS SAVED 119 

announced — so authentic rumor runs — 
that on the following night, he would 
sleep in Paris. His army, to the last man, 
was already feeling the heady intoxica- 
tion of assured capture of the city. Even 
the dullest, most unimaginative German 
soldier, as on and on his disciplined, 
steady tread carried him nearer and 
nearer to the French capital, was dream- 
ing his dream of what was to happen to 
him once he trod the macadam of Paris. 
Above the ringing shouts of the singing 
thousands, above the pulse-stimulating 
"Deutschland iiber Alles" there rang a 
song more stirring still. There was the 
quick, immediate promise of hearing one's 
musket ring down its steely thump on the 
resounding Paris streets before the very 
eyes of those craven Parisians. There 
would be the famous Parisian shops to 
loot, perhaps; there would surely be the 



120 HEROIC FRANCE 

great wine cellars, from which to drink 
one's fill; there would be gold given out 
in plenty, doubtless, since the French 
Banks were known to be gorged with 
money; and above all these, there would 
be the greatest prize of all — the beautiful 
French women! Can one wonder the 
officers in command found difficulty in 
restraining their men from a too im- 
petuous on-rush? The German officers 
themselves were pricked by the same 
exasperating impatience; their imagina- 
tions were working on more assured 
grounds of sensuous gratification. 

Their commanding General, however, 
was experiencing very different emotions. 
Instructed by his spies that important 
troops had been assembled within the 
city to confront him, von Kluck was 
facing a most difficult situation. If this 
Parisian army, newly constituted, it ap- 



HOW PARIS WAS SAVED 121 

peared, could but succeed in stopping, 
even for a very few days von Kluck's 
army, it could, the German General 
reasoned, at the same time easily be 
supported by the English army that fif- 
teen days of retreat had, apparently, not 
disorganized. These two armies could 
thus easily separate his, von Kluck's 
army, from the main Germany army. It 
might even inflict upon him a defeat 
that would be disastrous. 

The arrival, or rather the forward 
movement of von Bulow had been 
checked, as General von Kluck well knew, 
by the necessity laid upon the General 
to support the Crown Prince; von 
Billow's progress had thus been seriously 
hindered. He could not, therefore, un- 
supported rush towards the west to 
the rescue of General von Kluck's 
army. 



122 HEROIC FRANCE 

General von Kluck was thus forced to 
change his plan of attack; he found him- 
self obliged to march in an easterly direc- 
tion in order to insure his juncture with 
the main German army under von 
Bulow. There would thus always be 
time enough, the General argued, to re- 
begin their united rush on Paris, which, 
in any case, could be for them only a tri- 
umphant movement. Had this plan been 
carried out, the German armies would 
have entered Paris from the region in or 
about Versailles. 

Forced thus to deflect his course. Gen- 
eral von Kluck suddenly found himself 
confronted by a most unexpected and 
most vigorous defensive attack. The 
very next morning when General von 
Kluck began afresh his march on Paris, 
his right wing was hotly greeted by the 
muskets of the 5,000 Zouaves who during 



HOW PARIS WAS SAVED 123 

the night had been enabled to occupy 
and to entrench themselves in a com- 
manding position. 

What was happening? 

Had the army that had gone on to Le 
Mans been able to re-organize itself? 
Were these unexpected re-inforcements 
about to menace his rear? 

Von Kluck found himself obliged to 
call a halt. 

The very next morning there appeared 
General Joffre's order of the day, which 
in its simplicity will remain one of the 
most beautiful examples of military elo- 
quence in French annals. 

"Le temps n'est plus de regarder en 
arriere. Toutes troupes qui ne pourront 
plus avancer, devront rester et se faire 
tuer sur leurs positions." 

"The time has come when there can be 
no looking backwards. The troops who 



124 HEROIC FRANCE 

find they cannot advance must remain 
where they are and die where they 
stand." 

This order of the day will win for Gen- 
eral Joffre his seat in the French Aca- 
demy. 

But the gallant French troops were 
never called upon to obey that glorious 
challenge to French bravery. 

Within less than half a day's march on 
Paris, General von Kluck found himself 
forced to confront one of the bitterest 
moments in a military career. To ad- 
vance was to court all but certain dis- 
aster. Convinced the gallant Zouaves 
that had met the advancing troops with 
such murderous fire were supported by 
the lately assembled French army, Gen- 
eral Joffre had seemingly by sheer 
magic brought into being, von Kluck 
had but this alternative; he must retreat 



HOW PARIS WAS SAVED 125 

or commit the gravest error of which a 
commanding General could be guilty. 
An army of defense must be beaten in the 
field before a great city like Paris could 
possibly be captured. 

In the face of his wondering, murmur- 
ing but obedient army, General von 
Kluck gave his amazing command. The 
order for a general retreat was given. 

And Paris was saved. 

The battle of the Marne was the beaten 
General's desperate attempt to turn the 
tragedy of failure into the glory of a vic- 
tory that should again open wide the 
road to triumphant entry into the French 
capital. 

The military critics who have tried to 
explain by the above strategic move- 
ments the attitude of von Kluck have 
perhaps been unjust to him. It is all 
but officially known as an understood 



126 HEROIC FRANCE 

fact that in the German plan the honor 
of first entering Paris was to be reserved 
for the Crown Prince. Such a triumph 
would be a means of heightening the 
prestige of the Crown Prince in Germany. 
Perhaps von Kluck hesitated at the 
critical moment at usurping for himself 
an honor which had not been intended 
for him, since he might thus draw upon 
himself the resentment of the young 
Prince and of his Imperial father. In 
any case, to neither one nor the other was 
there to be ceded the honor of passing 
beyond the gates of the French capital. 



CHAPTER XI 

The Story of Lille's Abandonment 

THE tragedy of Lille having been 
apparently abandoned by her 
commanding General, left to her 
fate, and practically handed over to 
the army of invasion has as yet never 
been fully explained. Had General Percin 
remained at his post; had he obeyed 
the orders received from General Joffre, 
instead of keeping them unopened in 
his coat pocket for two long days, the 
English at Mons, would never have 
seen the flower of their army mown 
down; and the battle of Mons itself 

127 



128 HEROIC FRANCE 

might, according to the highest mihtary 
authorities, possibly have proved the 
turning of the tide in the AUies favor. 
Lille would have been saved and Paris 
would never have been threatened. 

But a party of Socialists played the 
part of fate at this crisis. 

On the approach of the Germans 
toward Lille, certain of the leading 
radical-socialists of that city went in 
a body, it appears, to the Prefet of Lille. 
They suggested to that functionary that 
were the city of Lille to be declared an 
open town the enemy would not bom- 
bard it. The town would be respected 
— its art treasures would be saved to 
the city; its valuable factories would 
be uninjured. Lille was rich; she could 
afford to suffer a little from an invading 
army; far better to pay "through the 
nose" even than to sacrifice Lille to the 



LILLE'S ABANDONMENT 129 

certain destruction wrought by the Ger- 
man big siege guns. 

This reasoning appealed to the Prefet. 
He was quite wiUing to act on the Com- 
mittee's suggestion that General Percin 
and his army of 150,000 men should 
march out of Lille, leaving the city to 
the Municipal government, — and to Ger- 
man mercy. The Prefet, however, re- 
minded the timid and practical-minded 
Lille Radicals that in order to perfect 
this plan, an order from the Minister 
of War must be forthcoming, since 
Monsieur X. had no authority over 
Percin nor his army. 

The Committee of Radical-Socialists 
"saw" the force of that argument. They 
acted on it with amazing celerity. The 
committee went up to Paris. They 
made their appeal to the then Minister 
of War who apparently viewed the 



130 HEROIC FRANCE 

case laid before him in the same favorable 
light as had the Prefet. The Radical 
Socialists returned to their native city 
with the signed order from the Minister 
of War in their pockets. 

In the meantime the British army, 
80,000 strong, had been bravely con- 
fronting overwhelming numbers of the 
Germans at Mons. This was on 
August 23rd. 

The English were in front of Maubeuge, 
facing Mons, and had as their mission 
to retard the advance of the German 
army while the French army was trying, 
at Dinant, to cut off by an energetic 
attack a part of the German army from 
its base of supplies and to take it 
between the lines. The English army 
soon found it could not continue its 
resistance against 500,000 Germans. Un- 
less reinforcements were speedily brought 



LILLE'S ABANDONMENT 131 

to their help, annihilation stared them, 
grim-eyed, in the face. General Joffre 
sent post haste his orders to General 
Percin to hasten to Mons to relieve 
the then all but decimated English 
troops. 

But General Percin was awaiting the 
answer the Radical-Socialists were carry- 
ing to Lille in their coat pockets. In 
his own General's pocket Percin kept 
the Commander-in-Chief's order for two 
days unopened. 

Meanwhile the gallant English army 
was being slaughtered like sheep brought 
to the shambles at Mons. A regiment 
of the Highlanders was reduced in two 
hours' time from 2,000 to 600. 

It was then that the English General, 
finding himself hopelessly outnumbered, 
and no reinforcements in sight, began 
the retreat whose orderly execution has 



132 HEROIC FRANCE 

already won for General French historic 
distinction. 

Meanwhile General Joffre, discovering 
Percin's inexplicable inactivity, made 
his own historic journey to Paris. Here 
he was made acquainted with the facts 
of the part played by the Radical- 
Socialists, of the order given by the 
War Minister to General Percin, and 
furthermore, of Percin's army having 
already evacuated Lille marching on 
towards Rouen. In a few hours, a 
complete revolution of the Cabinet was 
accomplished. The over-complacent War 
Minister, Monsieur Messimy, was turned 
out and Monsieur Millerand replaced 
him. Monsieur Delcasse, Monsieur 
Briand — the two ablest and most bril- 
liant statesmen France possesses — ac- 
cepted at an instant's notice, and without 



LILLE'S ABANDONMENT 133 

an instant's hesitation, the posts they 
now occupy in the Cabinet. 

General Joffre had announced to the 
heads of the French government his 
ultimatum; were contradictory orders to 
be issued from the War Office in 
moments of crisis, he must resign. Either 
he was Commander-in-Chief of the 
French army or he was not. General 
Percin having received orders from 
the Minister of War, at a time and 
moment when it was of the greatest 
importance his army should be hastening 
to the rescue of General French — orders 
to that effect having been forwarded 
from Headquarters — he had naturally 
beUeved it to be his duty to obey the 
command of the only authority superior 
to that of the Commander-in-Chief. 

Lille, in consequence, was captured. 
And the battle of Mons, that might 



134 HEROIC FRANCE 

well have proved a turning point in the 
fortunes of the Allies, was lost. 

When the German Uhlans, numbering 
only 3,000, entered Lille, the officer 
commanding this force presented him- 
self at the Mairie, speaking perfect 
French. He was recognized as having 
been in the employ of one of the most 
important manufacturies in town. When 
some of his men went into adjacent 
private stables to requisition some horses, 
this former spy, now an accredited 
German in high command, pointed to 
certain houses further up the street, 
assuring his men better mounts would 
be found in the designated dwellings. 

General Percin meanwhile, it is said, 
had taken pains to dismantle the forts, 
taking certain of the guns with him. 
He had left four or five thousand Ter- 
ritorials behind him. When the Uhlans 



LILLE'S ABANDONMENT 135 

entered the city, some of these troops 
were found cooking their evening meal. 
They were decimated, to the last man. 



CHAPTER XII 

The Army I Saw at Lisieux 

ON my return journey from Paris to 
my country place near Honfleur, 
Normandy, chance gave me an 
insight into a strategic movement, 
briUiantly planned, of General Joffre's 
far-reaching outlook in case his defense 
of Paris should prove unsuccessful. 

On descending from the train, the sta- 
tion was swarming with English soldiers. 
Many were out of the cars; they were 
gathered in thick groups about the near- 
est hydrants; laughing, joking, pushing, 
jostling one another, the "Tommies" 

136 



THE ARMY I SAW AT LISIEUX 137 

were enjoying their sousing as only 
Englishmen dehght in the use of 
water. 

Once our own cars had rolled on, leav- 
ing the track clear, long trains filled with 
Khaki-clad figures revealed the presence 
of thousands and thousands of British 
soldiers. There were regiments of the 
line, there were artillery regiments, there 
were cavalry regiments; there were also 
white-capped, blue-cotton-gowned Army 
nurses jumping in and out of their own 
special ambulance cars. Horses could be 
seen in their boxes nibbling at full bags; 
saddles were strewn in heaped-up masses; 
one weary artillery man was stretched at 
full length on a roll of blankets, his head 
having for a pillow the seat of a saddle. 
He was fast asleep, in a slumber so pro- 
found the noisy cries, the laughter, and 
the shouting voices about him were as 



138 HEROIC FRANCE 

unheard as though he were in his own bed 
in the quiet EngHsh village which, doubt- 
less, he had only recently left. 

In the Buffet, dozens of officers were 
quietly breakfasting. The English 
speech, the low, drawing-room tones, the 
restrained gestures, the graceful shapes 
and the clear-cut features made this little 
French Restaurant assume a strangely 
foreign aspect. Townspeople were gath- 
ered at doorways and windows to look 
their fill. The comments on the well- 
turned-out Englishmen, on their alert, 
yet subdued ways, on their ways also of 
eating and sitting, even of crossing their 
legs, clasping a foot, after finishing their 
meal and the lighting of their cigarettes — 
the comments of the lookers-on were 
characteristically French. 

"Ah, les gaillards, they know how to 
make themselves comfortable!" 



THE ARMY I SAW AT LISIEUX 139 

"See the money fly!" cried a long-nosed 
Norman, his eyes greedily glistening, as 
he saw an elderly General bring out a 
thick roll of French bills. 

"How they sit, as easy as though they 
were in a salon!" 

"And their clothes all as tidy as though 
on parade." 

"So are the men — well dressed. Yet 
one told me they had been in the trenches 
for a fortnight." 

"And two days and two nights on the 
way!" added lustily a lad bursting with 
the importance of his contribution. 

"Well, they are a brave lot. They only 
complain of one thing — they have no 
tobacco." 

The words carried an inspiring sugges- 
tion. To learn the unaccountable reasons 
for an English army here, at Lisieux, en- 
trained, going West or South (all the en- 



140 HEROIC FRANCE 

gines were heading apparently towards 
the coast) was a mystery that must be 
solved. 

The presiding genius at the Buffet 
obligingly helped me to solve the mys- 
tery. With our arms filled to over- 
flowing with cigarettes, my maid and I 
were soon busily passing bundles of cig- 
arettes to the outstretched soldier hands. 
I have never experienced, I think, as popu- 
lar a moment. Cries all along the line 
rose up, a pleading, laughing chorus. 
"Here, lady — don't forget a poor lad 
whose mother will bless you!" "Three 
cheers for the lady!" "And one for the 
bonnie lassie!" "And here, lady, not a 
smoke in a week! God bless you!" The 
response to our modest action was be- 
ginning to be somewhat overwhelming, 
when an officer, stepping from the near- 



TEE ARMY I SAW AT LISIEUX 141 

est car, touching his cap, suddenly con- 
fronted me. 

"Let me thank you, also, Madam, for 
your kindness to my men. I wish I could 
express my gratitude adequately." 

My ruse had succeeded. I must make 
quick use of the opportunity, for already 
orders to entrain were being rushed along 
the line. 

I had but one question to ask. I de- 
livered my blow. 

"You can. Why, can you tell me, are 
you heading South, or West, turning your 
backs on Paris, when the Germans are at 
Compiegne.f^" 

Even the perfect armor of complete 
self-mastery every English gentlemen 
wears as part of his training and ancestral 
inheritance may occasionally be pierced. 
The blue eyes that were staring at me 
opened wide as I hurled my question; 



142 HEROIC FRANCE 

and a faint flush rose on the dark, tanned 
cheek. 

There was moment's hesitation: there 
was a perceptible recoil; and then the 
gentleman had himself completely in hand . 
Again he touched his cap. His smile was 
still kindly, but the tone was edged with 
a distinct note of irony. 

"Ah, Madam! You are asking for what 
I cannot, alas! give you — ^for a military 
secret." 

"I know I am. But, unless you will at 
least give me a hint of the truth, how do 
you know what I may do?" 

The hearty English laughter assured 
me my volley had hit its mark. 

I then confided the fact that I was to 
sail for America on the morrow; that I 
was going on a small, slow ship, and there- 
fore could be trusted to keep any secret 
for at least ten days; also having lived in 



TEE ARMY I SAW AT LISIEUX 143 

France for fifteen years, and having been 
identified with Normandy for over a 
quarter of a century, I was as safe a 
guardian of a secret as even a man or a 
Frenchman could be. 

"Can you really keep a secret?" The 
blue eyes laughed again into mine their 
doubting smile. The officer wouldn't 
have been a man had he not also lightly 
mocked at me with his amused, incredu- 
lous tone. 

I finally convinced him of my trust- 
worthiness. The pact made was that I 
should divulge no hint either of having 
seen the entrainment, or of the destina- 
tion of the troops, until after landing at 
New York, and not even then were 
the Germans to force their way through 
Paris. 

I was thereupon told the reasons for this 
movement of an armv south. Five hun- 



144 HEROIC FRANCE 

dred thousand men, English and French 
were to concentrate at Le Mans, there to 
block the way — in case of an advance 
along the coast — or a dash of the German 
fleet for the harbors of Cherbourg or 
Brest. That was all I was to learn from 
the officer. For the order "Board the 
train!" "On board!" were being given. 
My kind friend of ten minute's intimacy 
— ^for is not confidence the supreme test 
of true friendship? — after shaking my 
hand had leapt to his post. The parting 
words I heard, as he leant his tall, grace- 
ful shape through the car window, I hear 
still: 

"If you keep this to yourself, for ten 
days, I'll begin to believe in a woman's 
word — again!" 

If this charming officer should ever see 
this page, he will know he can renew his 
faith. Five months have elapsed since his 



THE ARMY I SAW AT LISIEUX 145 

confession of lost illusions and the musi- 
cal, vocal note that rose above the ruder 
cries of "Cheers for the Ladies;" since the 
waving of caps, the puffing of volumes of 
smoke from the densely packed groups of 
happy-faced Tommies who crowded 
about doorways to wave hands and caps, 
and to shout "Good bye! Meet us again 
at the next station. Lady, Good bye!" 



CHAPTER XIII 

The German Fort Near Caen 

THE command of the Le Mans 
Railroad junction was not the 
only strategic point involved in 
sending an army to guard the doors of 
Upper Normandy, of Cherbourg, and 
of Brest. 

There was more at stake. Some few 
years ago — three, as far as my memory 
serves me — on my frequent automobile 
rides to Caen, I became interested in 
watching the building of what looked 
like foundries going on a few miles 
outside of this former capital. 

146 



THE GERMAN FORT NEAR CAEN 147 

A large tract of land, several wide 
acres in extent, had been razed bare of 
trees, farms, hedges and even of fertile 
fields and grassland. The future plan 
of construction obviously involved an 
extensive outlay of both capital and 
labor. Little by little, signs of the 
character of the enterprise became more 
and more evident. Workmen's houses 
lined the French miHtary road that 
joins Pont L'Eveque to Caen. These 
houses were no mere temporary, make- 
shift habitations; they were of solid 
masonry, stone-faced. These dwellings 
commanded the approach of the road 
leading to Caen. 

Gradually, huge buildings, tall chim- 
neys and wide areas of soUdly-laid 
concrete disfigured the lovely Normandy 
landscape. Far as the eye could see, 
dummy engines running on improvised 



148 HEROIC FRANCE 

rails and cars filled with earth that had 
a tawny tint, traversed the now stricken 
land. This colored dirt was a valuable 
mineral ore. 

On the west side of the military road 
uprose during the summer of 1913 a 
towering earthwork — a sort of miniature 
hillock. On top of this artificially-made 
prominence, there soon appeared a huge, 
roomy dwelling, the latter capped by a 
turret-like tower. The architecture of 
this house, as was that of the workmen's 
houses and of the various other minor 
buildings was sufficiently striking in 
character to provoke amazed comment. 
No Frenchman, it seemed, could possibly 
have designed lines and proportions that 
thus outraged every canon of taste. 

Inquiries as to what the house on its 
strangely planned elevation might be 
were not readily answered. Workmen 



THE GERMAN FORT NEAR CAEN 149 

passed one by shrugging indifferent 
shoulders. The bosses, "les patrons," 
turned their backs and quickly made 
for distant objective points when ques- 
tioned. It was only at the end of a 
year — last summer, 1914, in July — that 
I was able to elicit the following curt 
answer to my questioning: 

"The house up there — la haut? — it 
is the Superintendent's house." 

"But why build a hill, along a road- 
side and on a plain .f^" 

The man assumed a dogged, sullen 
look, "Sais pas" — and walked on. 

In the city of Caen itself no one 
seemed to be able to give more definite 
information. 

Bare, hideous, as was now this part 
of the land thus desecrated for com- 
mercial necessities, unsightly as were 
the huge, towering chimneys and the 



150 HEROIC FRANCE 

curiously-built, turret-like furnaces, over 
this whole tract of land there stretched 
a strange veil of mystery. Something 
sinister, a something uncanny hung about 
the place, as though some hidden menace 
or danger lurked in the very shadows 
cast by the uprising buildings. Those 
engaged in the vast works added to this 
sense of nameless semi-terror. The 
empty road, on the approach of an 
automobile, was in itself confession that 
a secret was to be guarded. 

On October 20, 1914, you might have 
read in any of the French papers, that 
"At the Council of the Ministers held 
this morning under the presidency of 
M. Poincare the Minister of Public 
Works has communicated the results 
of an inquest he had ordered made into 
the nature and character of the Nor- 
mandy mines. The Dielette mine. 



THE GERMAN FORT NEAR CAEN 151 

owned by M. Thyssen, must be seques- 
tered, according to the decree of 27 
Septembre, and because of its proximity 
to the forts of Brest. 

"The Lechateher-Thyssen Company, 
owners of the Caen Foundries, had 
contracted with the Thyssen Firm to 
furnish them with mineral ore and coal. 
These contracts are null and void under 
the same decree." 

Such was the official announcement 
of this interesting German plan for an 
easy capture of Caen and Cherbourg. 
For German the two firms were, and it 
was Krupps, it is unofficially stated, 
but affirmed under excellent authority, 
who were the owners of the two prop- 
erties, the real ownership being dis- 
guised under the name of their agents, 
Lechatelier-Thyssen — the latter a cele- 
brated German capitalist. 



152 HEROIC FRANCE 

The earthwork, on investigation by 
the French authorities, was found to 
be a miniature fort provided with loop- 
holes. This fort, together with the 
workmen's houses, solidly built, com- 
manded the approach along the military 
road. The Superintendent's house, high- 
perched, with its hideous but business- 
looking tower, overlooked the Caen 
plains for miles. Within the house were 
maps — maps whereon were designated 
every road, lane, field, house and farm. 
Every known instrument for use, in 
sighting either distance or guns, was 
found in abundance. The solid concrete 
foundations behind the embankment 
thus partly screened from view, would 
furnish the necessary base for the German 
siege guns. 

The plan was thus laid bare for an 
easy capture of Normandy. Had Paris 



THE GERMAN FORT NEAR CAEN 153 

fallen, the conquering German army 
would have marched on through Nor- 
mandy, laying waste this garden of 
Northern France. Mantes, Evreux, 
Lisieux,Pont TEveque — each jewel of Cal- 
vados in turn would have been despoiled 
of its architectural treasures. And Caen 
— grey-faced, spire-crowned Caen, whose 
streets have the wandering grace of a 
flowing stream, whose Norman, Gothic 
and Renaissance sculptures and archi- 
tectural masterpieces, whose Cathedrals 
and private hotels are set — as Bellini 
framed his Madonnas, in an arabesque 
of blossoms and flowers — Caen would 
doubtless have shared the same tragic 
fate as Rheims. 

Was there not, indeed, need of an 
army at Le Mans? 



CHAPTER XIV 

Modern Frenchmen 

GENERAL JOFFRE will stand out 
among the heroic figures of this 
stupendous struggle as Plutarch's 
men have stood to the world for two 
thousand years of hero worship. In the 
make-up of this remarkable man there 
are the antique Roman virtues of the 
noblest courage and the loftiest patriot- 
ism alHed to an American resourcefulness 
and power of initiative. There is a sub- 
base in his nature that seems to draw its 
inherited strength rather from Anglo- 
Saxon sources than from the more emo- 
tionable French strain. He has been com- 

154 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 155 

pared to General Grant; in both, the 
exercise of quiet power has been part of 
the secret of their success. General 
Joffre has the ruminating trait so charac- 
teristic of the American General, also 
highly developed. Slow to form conclu- 
sions, he shows powerful energy as a 
resolute, dogged fighter. 

In General Joffre's talent of restraint, 
in his capacity for holding back until the 
moment to strike comes; in his superb 
calm and rare knowledge of his own men 
— of their capacities, talents, possibilities 
of heroism, and how to with-hold their 
inflammable impulse to court death 
rather than not to meet the enemy more 
than half-way — ^he has shown himself a 
master of strategy, as well as possessing 
the military genius with which every 
great General must be endowed — or he 
fails as the ideal leader of his armies. 



156 HEROIC FRANCE 

"Le pere Joffre," as his soldiers lovingly 
call him, is implicitly trusted by his vast 
army, by the War Office, and through- 
out France. No higher praise can be 
awarded even to a Napoleon. 

Born in a small town in the Pyrennies 
— Rivesaltes, near Perpignan, a town on 
one of those stony rivers wittingly de- 
scribed by Alphonse Karr as "a river in 
which the washerwomen dry their 
clothes," there was neither illustrious 
parentage nor disturbing environment to 
hinder the development of those qualities 
of simplicity, modesty and naturalness 
that, like certain shy flowers, bloom best 
in the shade. 

The distinguishing feature of General 
Joffre's bearing and attitude is simplicity. 
That trait alone might seem to mark him 
as one destined to play a great role, since 
the greater the man, the less of pose will 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 157 

there be in his composition. General 
Joffre's choice in dressing proclaims his 
indifference to appearances. On his Gen- 
eral's uniform the only insignia of his 
rank to be seen are the three little em- 
broidered stars on the collar and sleeves. 
Not a single decoration, not a cross en- 
livens the dull black coat. "Big, a little 
heavy, but supple, well set up, firmly 
planted on his straight legs, the General 
gives one an impression of force — not the 
brutal, aggressive force of a Bismarck, 
but rather the strength of the bull, power- 
ful, patient, good, the artisan of fruitful 
harvests," says one of the French Gen- 
eral's admirers. 

In the eyes there is set a bit "of the 
light blue sky of France," the writer adds 
— "the whole face illuminated by this 
tender gaze — a look which surprises and 
charms." 



158 HEROIC FRANCE 

The genius of this great man presents 
rare quaHties in perfect equiUbrium. 
There is no discord, no seeming com- 
plexity in the make-up of this unusual 
character. The countenance reveals the 
man healthy, happy. "Neither illness 
nor ambition, nor the passions nor sorrow 
have left their imprint on this composed, 
resolute face." 

Another French writer has said of him 
that his is a "nature moyenne agrandie." 
No one of the traits in the French Gen- 
eral's character, taken separately, would 
surprise or prove greatness. In their en- 
semble, the capacity for long, laborious 
work, the power of reflection, the high 
sense of justice, the rare professional con- 
science that can be both severe and yet 
appreciative, and above all, the possession 
of infinite patience — it is in the union of 
all these qualities in perfect balance that 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 159 

we find the secret of the great general's 
strength. 

For years General Joffre has foreseen 
the coming of the present war in Europe. 
Again and again he has lifted a prophetic 
voice. 

"To be ready to-day all the resources 
of the country, all the intelligence of the 
people, all their moral energy, must have 
been directed with method, with tenacity, 
towards a single end — towards victory. 
Everything must have been organized, 
foreseen. Once hostilities are declared, 
no improvisation will avail. What is 
then lacking will always be lacking. The 
least mishap might cause a disaster." 

And again: 

"Each and all must help in the prepa- 
ration for the national defense. No 
single, individual action must be lost. 
The goodwill of all is necessary. . . . 



160 HEROIC FRANCE 

This preparation is dependent for results 
on all effort, general or particular, posi- 
tive or negative, intelligent or mistaken, 
past or present, in all the branches of 
national activity. Such preparation is 
allied to national life, and can be devel- 
oped in perfect harmony with the activity, 
the prosperity and the civilization of the 
country." 

While conscious, "intelligent" prepa- 
ration for such a war as we now see 
France is waging against Germany may 
not have been an organized national 
movement, the steady advance, the silent 
forces in the upbuilding of French char- 
acter have produced results that have 
won praise even from her enemies. 

Many of the traits revealed by the 
great circumstance of war in General 
Joffre's character may be said to be es- 
sentially modern French traits. The 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 161 

character of the whole French nation has 
been going through a most interesting 
process of evolution during the past forty- 
odd years. This development has been 
particularly noticeable within the last 
ten years. 

Had Germany wished for an easy vic- 
tory, she should not have waited forty 
years to attack France. In those four 
decades the whole French nation has 
been given a chance for growth, for the 
development of some of its best and 
noblest energies. The democratic form 
of government has spread throughout the 
whole nation, the light of an illuminated 
hope; for the first time in its history, 
France has had the consciousness of 
being freed from the oppressive tyranny 
of monarchical and priestly despotism. 
Ten years have passed since it has 
shaken off the last fetters that bound it 



162 HEROIC FRANCE 

to blind obedience. The separation of 
Church and State released France from 
the last link that rivetted her to feudal 
survivals of autocratic authority. 

Under these novel conditions a new 
man has grown up in France. The slow, 
formative process that has been going 
on during the days since Sedan has 
developed individualism. A new France 
has been forged. Every man in France 
now stands on his own feet. When 
he shoulders his gun, when he makes 
his superb dashes at the enemy's front, 
he knows why and for whom he is 
fighting. He is fighting for himself, 
and not for a king; he is defending 
his own wife and children, and not a 
king's mistress; he is crying above the 
roar of bullets, "Vive la France!" be- 
cause, at last, France is his very 
own. 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 163 

The various processes that have built 
up this new type of Frenchmen are, a 
Republican form of government; the 
spread of socialism; and the separation 
of Church and State. To these formative 
conditions must be added the tremendous 
influences attributable to compulsory 
education in the schools, and the elective 
education of the press. 

The educative power and influence of 
the press throughout France has been 
one of the strongest bulwarks of the 
present Republican form of government. 
Every Frenchman, however poor, reads 
his paper. It is greatly to the credit 
of such popular newspapers as Le Petit 
Journal^ Le Petit Parisien and others, 
costing a sou — thus within the means 
of the very poorest — that this daily 
education of French boys and men has 
on the whole been so wholesome. The 



164 HEROIC FRANCE 

newspapers have been builders up of a 
world-wide knowledge, as well as the 
planters of the seed of patriotic ardor. 
Socialists, Anarchists have their own 
more revolutionary press — as is well 
known. But such is the power for good 
of even this revolutionary press in 
France in a crisis; such is the inherited 
instinct for order, for organized solid- 
arity, that at a "mot d'order" — at a 
word of command — those masses that 
seem but to wait for the waving of the 
torch of insurrection to fire to atoms 
the whole fabric of the social order, can 
as easily be lead to defend it. The 
Socialists' unanimous gathering to the 
support of the Republican appeal to 
arms, on reading Jaures' last article 
to his followers, was triumphant proof 
of the power of the press to awaken 
instantaneous response. 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 165 

In Germany the press is muzzled. 
There are all the processes employed 
by which tyrannical dictators have re- 
duced a State to abject authority. The 
''Welt-fonds" controls the press. The 
German press is a government organ; 
it gives the news of the world as it 
wishes it might be; it reproduces gov- 
ernment acts magnified to splendid 
achievement. The contrast between the 
English, French and American accounts 
of the battles, in the present war, and 
the German "communiques" sufficiently 
proves the muzzling process employed 
in the so-called "Reptile Press." Even 
this controlled Press is not available 
to all classes of Germans. To secure 
daily delivery of one's newspaper, a 
German citizen must subscribe to his 
paper. If he wishes to buy a sheet, he 
must seek one at the cafes. How many 



166 HEROIC FRANCE 

of the "men in the street" can enter a 
well lighted cafe in shabby clothes 
with only the few "phennigs" in his 
pocket with which to buy his news- 
paper? One easily understands the 
meaning of the oft-repeated remarks 
of the common German soldier taken 
prisoner: "We did not know what 
the war was about." 

The mistaken poHcy of all tyrannical 
forms of government is the same — ^to use 
the lie according to the Jesuit formula — 
that the end justifies the means. This sys- 
tem was possible under older monarchical 
conditions. In our modern world the 
lie is a weak screen and a broken weed. 
The cable, the telegraph and the war 
correspondent, the latter the contemp- 
oraneous historian — writing history as 
fast as it is being made — all these 
modern agencies make truth the best. 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 167 

as well as the surest victorious 
policy. 

The progressive transformation of the 
national character in France has been 
especially noticeable in the peasant and 
working classes, and in the lower and 
middle bourgeoisie, — in that world of 
Frenchmen which makes up the more 
vital, vigorous part of the nation. 

Each and every one of these factors 
has been a contributary force in the 
development of these modern French- 
men. In the laboring class especially, the 
new ideals have permeated the whole 
body of workers, — ideals that have taken, 
it is true, a more or less socialistic, 
revolutionary form. Socialism has taught 
the man who toils his power, and the 
power that comes from organization. 
But all Frenchmen are not socialists. 
The best citizens among French work- 



168 HEROIC FRANCE 

ingmen are too intelligent to be led 
blindfolded into pitfalls painstakingly 
prepared by that leisure class among 
socialists — the leaders — who toil a little 
so as not to spin, but whose toil is of 
the easy-chair order. 

What socialistic doctrines were worth, 
as far as the non-combative principle 
goes, has been proved by the on-rush of 
the whole body of believers, both 
in France and Germany, to join in a 
war of defence in France, and in one of 
the most stupendous wars for pure 
conquest and lust of power in Germany. 

Modern ideals and aspirations are 
moulding throughout the world the 
whole social fabric. A democratic 
form of government and the spread of 
the doctrine of individualism have given 
a new bent, new aims, a wholly novel 
outlook, to French minds and character. 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 169 

The modern Frenchman is imbued with 
the consciousness of belonging to him- 
seK — of being a free man. For the 
first time in his long, historic experience, 
he realizes he stands on his own feet; 
he neither wears the shackles of the 
mediaeval vassal, nor is he dependent 
on court nor king. He is a voter. 
Below all the effervescence of the na- 
tional love of parading its woes; below 
all the disturbing currents of political 
animosities, the slow, steady process of 
the evolution of individualism has given 
birth to the modern Frenchman. Some 
of these newer conceptions of life are 
not, perhaps, as poetic, nor are they as 
picturesque, if looked at from an aesthetic 
point of view, as were some of the lost 
dreams that have made the figures of 
heroes, of martyrs, and of saints who 
crowd the pages of French history as 



170 HEROIC FRANCE 

thick as do the thousands of statues 
that people her still unmutilated Cathe- 
drals. Yet it is in this, the Frenchman's 
progress in measuring the values that 
count in life, in a higher conception of 
duty, of responsibility, and in purer 
ideals among the people, that some of 
the more famous among modern French 
writers have found their material, — 
Rene Bazin in "Le Ble qui Leve," Barres 
in his numerous novels, and Brieux in 
his strong problems plays, such as "Les 
Remplacantes," "La Robe Rouge," "Les 
Avaries," etc. 

To the immense and beneficent in- 
fluences of its purer literature, and par- 
ticularly to the press throughout France, 
one must add compulsory education as 
one of the chief factors in developing 
French mind and character. The stride 
in the progress made throughout all 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 171 

classes in France has been prodigious 
since the separation of church and state. 
The powerful, repressive influence of the 
clergy on liberal education was then 
removed. New ways and methods im- 
mediately came into vogue; oral lectures 
as opposed to routine recitations became 
popular. Children instead of being 
kept in school for long hours, were 
brought by mothers or governesses to 
classes for certain lessons only, to which 
they arrived fresh, eager for competitive 
recitation. 

The novelty of hearing serious and 
learned Professors of the Sorbonne, of 
the Institut, nien of science, historians, 
renowned actors and literati lecturing 
to vast audiences at the theatres, at 
lecture halls, such as Le Foyet and 
L'Hotel des Annales, to young and old, 
— such lectures delightfully diversified 



172 HEROIC FRANCE 

by actors, actresses and danseuses, to 
illustrate historical episodes or the works 
of poets and even novelists, have done 
more to develop the mind of the growing 
generation than has ever been accom- 
plished before in France. 

These novel processes have stimulated 
the naturally quick French mind, in- 
creased its powers of reasoning, and 
enlarged the range of criticism and 
observation. 

There has thus been an extraordinary 
rebound noticeable, throughout France, 
once the pent-up energies of its people 
were released from certain old-world 
traditions and tyrannies. French char- 
acter has proved also its indestructible 
quality. The forces that had made it 
great under so many kingships, that had 
survived so many disastrous reverses, 
revolutions and foreign invasions, which 



MODERN FRENCHMEN 173 

only recently have re-acted from the 
dispiriting effects of Fashoda, from the 
scandals of the Dreyfus, the Humbert 
and the Caillaux trials, were forces as 
potential as ever. 

"Le grand secret de duree qui fut la 
France," is her secret still. 



CHAPTER XV 

Some Racial Traits 

IT is no part of the design of this 
short book to enlarge on the long 
stretch of historical development of 
the two thousand years of historic life 
during which France has been working 
out its destiny. Yet, rightly to under- 
stand the structure of modern French 
character, to enable one even to guess at 
the origin of some of those finer qualities 
which, like the fire that lies hidden in 
embers, suddenly flash forth to amaze 
and delight an admiring world, at least 
a superficial survey of some of the forces 

174 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 175 

that have forged the contrasting traits 
that puzzle foreigners must be made 
known. 

How Httle the foreigner reaUzes that, 
in meeting one Frenchman, he is not 
meeting all Frenchmen. The best known 
type is, admittedly, the Parisian, whether 
he be nobleman or shopkeeper, petit 
rentier or workman. Yet, below the 
Parisian veneer of acquired grace and 
good manner, of glib wit, of flippant 
cynicism, let a crisis come, and the 
veneer cracks: one suddenly confronts 
a new man. The Gascon becomes gar- 
rulous; the Burgundian truculent; the 
Breton mulish or recklessly brave; the 
Provencale fiery and tempestuous; the 
Norman silent — ^yet ready armed for 
any adventure; and the man of the 
north, stubborn, aggressive, capable of 
Flemish endurance. 



176 HEROIC FRANCE 

French literature has reflected these 
various hereditary strains and charac- 
teristics. Who could mistake Guy de 
Maupassant's Normans for Daudet's 
"Tartarin de Tarascon?" Flaubert's 
"Madame de Bovary" would have found 
no prototype in priest-ridden, Catholic 
Brittany. Bazin would never have 
sought in the Midi his heroines. And 
Antole France's "Le Lys Rouge," — that 
delicate Parisian passion-flower — could 
only have bloomed in the hot-house 
warmth of Parisian salons. 

The various ethnological strains that 
give to each province in France its racial, 
distinctive note, help to solidify the 
nation. Variety, like competition, works 
for intensive effort. When a nation is 
composed of many diverse elements, it 
is like a mother that has given birth to 
strong men. If men are strong, they 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 177 

will not all be of the same family likeness, 
but they will each and all speak the 
same tongue; at their mother's knee 
they have all learnt the same prayers; 
and when they separate, their eyes turn 
homewards to the central home fires, — 
to the source from which they drew 
their breath. 

France has had, in turn, to amalga- 
mate the Celt, the Gaul, the Frank, 
the Roman and the Norman. The 
five hundred years of Roman civilization 
superimposed a second base on the 
earlier Gallic foundation. Rome was 
to unify Gaul, giving her a common 
language, a common law, a commercial 
system, a unified coinage, as well as 
the peace and security and the wonderful 
organizing system the Empire brought 
to all her conquered countries. The 
best postal system in the Europe of 



178 HEROIC FRANCE 

Caesar's day was the one established 
by the Conqueror, to keep him in 
constant contact with Rome. The 
superb Roman roads, still traceable 
in our days, built by conquered Gauls, 
taught Romanized Gaul the inestimable 
advantage of highways over rivers — 
the earlier, more facile means of com- 
munication. The Roman cities and their 
splendor and luxury were models to be 
copied and improved upon, by the race 
of born artists who, after centuries of 
a worship of mysterious Druidical deities 
and, later, of Greco-Roman gods, could 
turn temples erected in honor of Venus and 
Apollo into the early Christian churches. 
The base on which rests French char- 
acter is thus proved to be composed 
of innumerable racial elements. The 
varied contradictions we see in that 
character can only be explained and 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 179 

understood by even a cursory knowledge 
of the racial inheritances bequeathed 
to it. Who would imagine that an in- 
vasion of German Franks gave their 
name to France as early as the second 
half of the fifth century B.C.? This 
race, though of Celtic origin, closely 
resembled the German type; it was 
blue-eyed, tall and fair. The shorter- 
statured, dark-eyed natives the Iberians 
and Ligurians found in possession of the 
soil, the Franks subdued, but did not 
wholly supplant. The main body of 
these conquering Franks super-imposed 
their habits and customs on the natives. 
Later, it was these two races, the Gauls 
and Franks, as well as the Iberians and 
Ligurians, Rome had to fight, when 
Caesar came. 

The prolonged survival of some of 
these ancient races which, each in turn. 



180 HEROIC FRANCE 

conquered portions of the then vast 
region known as GaUi, is proved in the 
names of Gascons adopted by the 
Aquitani, — Gascon giving birth to 
Basques, the latter a term applied to 
the Aquitani who, in the lower Pyrenees, 
have preserved almost unchanged, a 
race and language untainted by Roman 
influences. 

The base of French life and character 
already rested on a secure foundation 
when Rome came to give her five 
hundred years of Roman civilization. 

When Caesar, lying in his silken, 
curtained litter, scanned between the 
open slits the country he was to seal 
with the stamp of Roman conquest, 
his eyes must have opened wide — 
Roman eyes though they were. Let us 
lift a corner of the curtain that veiled 
the brilliant summer sun for Caesar's 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 181 

curious, critical gaze, as he looked out 
on the France of his day — not yet 
France. The Gaul he saw and conquered 
was one vast forest, with occasional 
clearings. In these clearings were em- 
bryonic towns, called oppida. One re- 
members Cicero's contemptuous fling "Is 
anything more hideous than a GalKc op- 
pidum?'' Yet in those despised, primitive 
towns we find rather a surprising degree of 
comfort and luxury, as well as a rude pro- 
tective strength against outside foes. 

Certain survivals in French family 
life have been handed down from the 
dwellers of those aedificia. Those isolated 
dwellings were usually situated beside 
a stream, close to the open forest. The 
Frenchman's love of the open air, his 
passion for dining, for sipping his demi- 
tasse under the open sky, was thus 
one of his earliest inheritances. 



182 HEROIC FRANCE 

The state of this earHer Galhe society 
was patriarchal. One reahzes how strong 
is the survival of this system in the 
solidarity of family life in the France 
of our day. Those who do not know 
France fUppantly assert her indifference 
to the family tie. Those of us who 
have lived among French men and 
women realize that the common re- 
proach of there being no family life in 
France should rather be directed to the 
fact that, in many cases, there is nothing 
else. Each family in France is a little 
tribe unto itself. This close knitting 
of the family tie accounts for much of 
the narrow, insular, provincial point of 
view. 

The dot system had been handed 
down from those early Gallic days. 
Already women had attained to a digni- 
fied place in that ancient family life. 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 183 

She was not bought — she brought with 
her her dot. She could even then be 
considered, in a certain sense, a proprie- 
tress, since her husband must give, as 
an equivalent for her dot, his share of 
his fortune in flocks. In virtue of such 
a marriage contract, women exercised 
an indirect influence in the family or, 
by virtue of her rank or possessions, 
became a political factor. 

The modern French passion for dress, 
and a taste for combining contrasting 
colors was already prevalent, even in 
Caesar's day. The bright tints in women's 
dress recently brought into fashion by 
the Balkan wars give us a hint of the 
rich carracalla — a sort of blouse; of the 
striped embroidered sagum, or mantles, 
sometimes worn with a huge buckle, 
dropping from the shoulder. The scar- 
lets, purples, delicate pinks and mustard 



184 HEROIC FRANCE 

yellows of these garments were further 
enriched by gold and metallic ornaments. 
From arms and necks — ^necks browned 
in the sun, the round, thick necks of a 
young, vigorous race — as from fingers, 
flashed the soft gleam, the darting fires 
of priceless jewels. 

As though conscious of how taking 
would be the record, as a last decorative 
adjunct to this somewhat barbaric but 
intensely picturesque apparel, the Gauls 
preceded the French coiffeur and his 
more than willing customers, in a pref- 
erence for blond hair. It was the Gallic 
fashion to wash one's hair in — chalk! 
It appears a blond tint can be produced, 
indefinitely, by the constant use of 
this element, if properly mixed with 
water. I should not, however, advise 
any over-zealous imitators of early Gallic 
tastes to follow the recipe. This care- 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 185 

fully cultivated, tinted hair was worn 
long, — hair that, when fighting, streamed 
in the wind like a horse's mane. 

Before Rome came to give her richer 
base of a refined and elaborate civiliza- 
tion to the nation that was later to 
perpetuate it — the torch handed from 
one Latin hand to the hand that raises 
it aloft to-day — already Gaul was known 
for its artistic productions. Industrial 
arts had, indeed, made the name of 
Gallic taste and skill attain to such a 
degree of perfection as to make their 
ceramics, their working of gold, silver, 
copper and even iron, renowned. The 
great Gallic specialty, however, was their 
admirable art of enameling. These clever 
Gauls had also brought to such a degree 
of finish their knowledge of tinning 
they were enabled to make their copper 
vessels shine, as though wrought of 



186 HEROIC FRANCE 

pure silver. These products were sought 
for, even before the Roman con- 
quest, by every Roman amateur of 
taste. 

In our day, the soldier has the instinct 
to copy birds or insects thus attempting 
to reproduce the colors of nature the 
better to utilize nature as a protective 
element. But the Gauls went to battle 
either stark — or in Oriental magnificence; 
their art must be the servant of their 
military splendor. When the war 
chariots, massed in solid ranks, flew 
towards the Roman foe, the silver wheels 
of the cars gleaming under the strong 
noon sun so blinded the eyes of the 
enemy as to make them blink. These 
silver wheels, it is recorded, were beauti- 
fully chiseled, as were the jewels of the 
period, and the jewelled ornaments of 
the soldiers. 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 187 

If Rome brought along with its amphi- 
theatres that delight in spectacular rep- 
resentation which has never died out, 
in France, making the French Theatre 
today the most vital and fructifying 
dramatic element in the modern world, 
the secrets Rome stole from Athens' 
learning, philosophy and art, she whisp- 
ered, and then trumpetted, into France's 
eager ear. Once the Winged Victory 
had crossed the Alps bearing on her 
wings the golden-dusted pollen of Greek 
art and literature, she found a soil 
congenial to the continuation and perpet- 
uation of her treasured knowledge. 

Five centuries after Caesar's genius 
had begun the transformation of warring 
tribes into the nucleus of a nation, the 
Normans were to sail up the Seine to 
have their rude eyes dazzled by the 
gleam of Paris, — that seemed to them 



188 HEROIC FRANCE 

as though set in a coronal of gold. To 
the France of that day, these Northmen 
were to bring, in their turn, a sturdier 
spirit of high adventure, their solid 
qualities of frugality, of industry, and 
their passion for conquest. They were 
to give to England a Norman king, as 
they also carried Norman valour as far 
south as the walls of Sicily, there to set 
in the gleaming mosaics of its cathedrals, 
the saints and martyrs of the hierarchy 
of Heaven. 

The later, shaping influences of the 
Crusades — that tidal wave of wider know- 
ledge and wider being brought about 
by extensive travel to foreign lands 
no Frenchman of the Middle Ages would 
have dreamed of undertaking, unless 
under the impulse of passionate re- 
ligious conviction; — and later the elevat- 
ing, refining effects of chivalry, all these 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 189 

influences prepared the nation for its 
great awakening to Renaissance enlight- 
enment. 

The Bourbons brought the stultifying 
principle of the divine right of kings 
to a climax. The whole history of 
France since the reign of Louis XV has 
been the struggle of the people to crush 
that doctrine. If she lost some of her 
power in Europe at the close of the 
eighteenth century, owing to the disas- 
trous effects of the Austrian Succession 
and the Seven Years' War, out of her 
defeats she was to wrench the golden 
secret of a new force — of a new ennobling 
principle. Her philosophers, in the latter 
years of this eighteenth century of an 
eclipse of power, were to dream a new, 
a wonderful dream, one France and 
America were the first to prove might 
be turned into reality. The Encyclo- 



190 HEROIC FRANCE 

pedists and Voltaire and Rousseau 
were to preach the astounding creed that 
a people might rise against a king, that 
priests might find their power a broken 
weed, and that a return to nature was 
the salvation of those who had lived in 
the hot-house tryanny of courts. 

The French Revolution that was to 
inflame all Europe in a general conflag- 
ration produced a constructive genius. 

Napoleon rose out of the flames of 
the Revolution, to re-establish order, to 
introduce a renewed security, and to 
dream his dream of an old-world conquest 
of Europe. Since his fall, France has 
been living under successive govern- 
ments, apparently suffering from periodi- 
cal attacks of political instability. 

In point of fact, her real unity as a 
nation dates from before and after 
Napoleon's reign. France has been 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 191 

steadily growing to mature knowledge 
of herself and her own needs and wants 
since 1793. Her development in self- 
consciousness began with the firing of 
the Bastile. She knew then, as she 
knows now, exactly what she wanted. 
The opening of those prison doors was 
significant, terrifying to kingship and 
to priest-craft dominion. The soul of 
France was born at last, and that soul 
proposed to be freed from all forms of 
oppression, tyranny, and unlawful rule. 
You may read the histories of the 
successive reigns, revolutions, and politi- 
cal upheavals that have convulsed France 
since Napoleon went to end his days on 
that sun-scorched island in the seas to 
the present day, when Socialists and 
Radicals have been fighting to protect 
their own soil and their wives and 
children against Prussian military de- 



192 HEROIC FRANCE 

spotism, and the history of France is 
just that — the determination of the whole 
French nation to be freed from any form 
of oppression. 

In spite of the battle waged between 
Combists and the clergy, between those 
in favor of compulsory non-religious 
education, and the Catholic's clamoring 
for at least a recognition of Deity in 
the common schools, France as a nation 
has gained immeasurably from the sep- 
aration of her church and state. In the 
end the clergy will find their own status, 
among all classes of Frenchmen, will also 
have been greatly improved. The present 
war will inaugurate a new area; it has, 
indeed, already seen the miracle accom- 
plished of a universal revival of genuine 
religious feeling throughout France. 
The Catholic religion, of all religions 
in the world, is the one peculiarly suited 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 193 

to French character. Its pomp and 
splendor appeal to the Frenchman's de- 
light in beauty — ^to the sensuous side 
of his nature, as its wonderful organiza- 
tion delights his sense of orderliness. 
Authority, divested of despotic power, 
is a force, also, every Frenchman re- 
spects — he who for thousands of years 
has lived under authority. 

The cry of indignation that rang up 
throughout the ranks of believing Cath- 
olics when the law was passed compelling 
priests to serve their term in the Army, 
should now be turned into a paean. 
The courage, the bravery displayed by 
the clergy serving in the ranks, their 
members fronting death in the trenches 
or as ambulance nurses along the fire 
zone, administering the Sacrament to 
dying comrades one moment, to shoulder 
the rifle the next, — such proofs of mag- 



194 HEROIC FRANCE 

nificent heroism will accomplish results 
which the Socialists, in their short- 
sighted fanaticism, never dreamt could 
come to pass. The fighting priest will 
reconquer his lost prestige. He is the 
brother-in-arms who lifts the sacrament 
above his musket. He is the visible 
embodiment of that church in which 
every fighting Frenchman had made his 
First Communion, in which he has knelt 
in prayer by his mother's side as a lad, 
in which he was married, and through 
whose ministration, if he lives to return 
to the home parish, he will be buried. 
He may have turned scoffer; may have 
accepted the modern creeds of ill- 
digested, semi-atheistic ideas ; when front- 
ing death, he turns as instinctively to 
the priest beside him, comrade and 
friend now, one sharing the same agony 
of immobility in the same narrow spaces, 



SOME RACIAL TRAITS 195 

the same horrors of hfe in the trenches, 
the same appalhng possibiUty of capture, 
mutilation, or quick death, — to this form- 
erly, perhaps, hated priest the most 
violent anti-clerical will turn, as a child 
seeks its mother's arms. 

The Socialists never knew in truth 
what weapons they were forging for 
future use among the clergy when they 
made the priests into soldiers. After 
working, suffering, starving, shivering, 
fighting and agonizing side by side, there 
will emerge a new solidarity, a better 
understanding, a more intimate brother- 
hood, between all ranks of both clergy 
and the men in the army. 



CHAPTER XVI 

The Contrast in Ideals 

AMONG the surprises the present 
war waging in Europe has given 
to the world, not the least in 
importance is the revelation of these 
various unsuspected forces latent in 
French character. That France could 
meet a crisis with courage and dignity, 
not even those nations who denied her 
possessing an ideal of moral conduct 
could doubt. Her varied gifts, her 
taste — that dictates in matters of art 
and dress; her literary superiority in 
point of style; and her many brilliant 

196 



TEE CONTRAST IN IDEALS 197 

contributions to science and medicine, — 
all these have been generously conceded. 
Her homelier virtues of thrift, her prodi- 
gious industry, her temperance in living, 
have been frequently presented as models 
for those whose less disciplined natures 
made them rather critics than creators 
of national prosperity. 

The world, however, as a world, has 
not been as seriously interested in French 
virtue as in her supposed deflection from 
the straight path. Paris, that stands 
for all France — ^to most foreigners — has 
been judged as Voltaire judged Paris — 
Cashmire; the character of its inhabit- 
ants has been summed up as being 
gracious, amiable, light-hearted, as ser- 
iously occupied with bagatelles as other 
people are with important affairs. Above 
all else, the whole French nation has 
been indicted for pursuing pleasure to 



198 HEROIC FRANCE 

the fatal point of precipitating the mo- 
ment of its national decadence. For 
a decade or more not only her sister 
nations and the Americas, but France 
itself, have been loudly proclaiming 
France's obvious and inevitable degenera- 
tion. 

In the fortnight preceding the out- 
break of the war France did, indeed, 
appear to present to the eyes of the 
world the spectacle of a nation tearing 
at its own vitals. With a frankness 
unmatched by that of any other people. 
Frenchmen expose their very worst side 
in moments of political crisis. They let 
the whole world into the secret of their 
family quarrels; they not only indecently 
expose the household linen to public 
view, but seemingly delight in dilating 
on the rents and tears, even to the point 
of drawing public attention to the in- 



TEE CONTRAST IN IDEALS 199 

ferior quality of the article. No people 
in the world indulge in self -abuse as 
do the French. Exposure of national 
mistakes, peculiarities, absurdities, or 
contradictions presented by the national 
character, stimulate the analytical faculty; 
and the Frenchman is yet to be born 
who would not sacrifice the patriot to 
the critic — in words. In moments of 
action the critic dies of inanition; the 
hero rises from his ashes. 

This passion for caustic self-criticism 
is one of the many reasons for the all 
but universal misjudgment meeted out 
to the Frenchman. The world is not 
yet sufficiently old not to believe what 
it hears. When, therefore, France, 
through its press, its theatre, its literature 
and its Montmartre exhibitions, pro- 
claims the degree of corruption and the 
period of decadence in morals it has 



200 HEROIC FRANCE 

attained, all the world comes to the 
funeral. 

What centuries of religious develop- 
ment of conduct can produce, the Mussel- 
man proves to us: "Our ideal is to die 
in battle" was the outburst of a Radjut 
recently landed at Marseilles. ''If only 
the war is not over," he added, with a 
hopeful smile. A Japanese does not see 
the Moslem's immediate reward of hour- 
is awaiting him at the gate of Paradise; 
he, being of the cult of Shinto, considers 
the supreme bliss to be able to sacrifice 
his life for his Mikado. 

The German soldier is neither a Mos- 
lem nor a believer in Shintoism. He 
has not had the advantage of long 
centuries of training. Yet, under the 
new system of German methods for 
the making over of citizens into soldiers 
since 1870, the systematic, educational 



THE CONTRAST IN IDEALS 201 

development of Germany from a peace- 
loving, sober, home-abiding people, into 
a nation intoxicated with the heady wine 
of 'Veltpolitik" has startled Europe, 
America, — the whole world into amazed 
surprise. It is, perhaps, rather Germany 
who should be amazed at the world's 
blindness, — at the dense stupidity of 
other nations. For has it not been a 
proof of extraordinary dullness, of de- 
fective vision in others, not to be able 
to see the very plain writing on the wall 
Germany has been openly spelling out 
for all the world to read.^ For forty -four 
years Germany's pohcy, national, in- 
ternational, colonial, educational, mili- 
tary, has had but one definite aim, — to 
weld her huge Empire into one mag- 
nificent machine. As has been well said, 
"We see that Germany .... 
is the most triumphant example of 



202 HEROIC FRANCE 

science and brains applied to state 
building." 

The system has been tried before. It 
was effectively introduced on a smaller 
scale in Sparta. All male Sparta was 
in the army. We know the results of 
that war-like spirit on the destinies of 
Greece. After Athens lost her fleet in 
Syracusan waters, the military nations 
of Sparta first, and then Macedonia, 
conquered Athens. These invasions pre- 
pared the way for the Roman conquest. 

A military nation has no use for, nor 
can she really understand, the moral 
effects of ideals of conduct. Yet Sparta 
produced no Kaiser — passionless, relent- 
less, more cruel than Nero, since he 
has had the developments in humanitari- 
anism of two thousand years of accumu- 
lated teaching in the lessons of mercy; 
nor did Greece hand down to us the 



THE CONTRAST IN IDEALS 203 

brutal philosophies of a Neitzsche or a 
Treitschke. We had to wait these two 
thousand years for a Teutonic civiliza- 
tion, supposed to be founded on a 
Christian basis, to produce three such 
cold-blooded disciplinarians. 

Germany has already been indicted at 
the bar of the world as she will be here- 
after decried by future historians, not 
only for the crimes she has committed in 
defiance of the laws of humanity and the 
rules that govern modern warfare, but 
for her imperfect civilization. 

The supreme test of the civilization of 
a people is the degree of refinement it has 
reached in manners, in its power of self- 
control, in its treatment of women, in its 
methods of warfare, and in its sense of 
justice. Judged by the above standards 
Germany presents herself as inferior to 
almost every nation with any pretentions 



204 HEROIC FRANCE 

to culture. Her manners have long been 
noticeably coarse, have even grown more 
and more offensive since her develop- 
ment as a military power; her treatment 
of women in her own realm is mediaeval, 
since the subordination of woman is 
necessary to state needs and state re- 
quirements; the German deficiency in 
self-control was proven in the lustful 
orgie of Lou vain, in their barbarous, 
primitive gloating in sheer senseless bru- 
tality and in the rapture of killing for the 
sake of killing. Violence, barbarity and 
cruelty can never be considered as proofs 
of culture. Germany's deficiencies help 
us as have no other models, to define ex- 
actly what we understand by civihzation. 
We know and feel France to be almost 
completely civilized, without the necess- 
ity imposed upon us to define the charac- 
ter of her civilization. We had vaguely 



THE CONTRAST IN IDEALS 205 

imagined Germany, were the test applied, 
would stand among the other leading 
civilized European states. Her intel- 
lectual achievements, her scientific at- 
tainments, her love of art, her musical 
supremacy, and her prodigious talent for 
organization as well as her industrial ex- 
pansion marked her as standing all but 
first among the progressive nations. 

The supreme test of the passions 
aroused by war have proved that the soul 
of Germany was still the soul of the sav- 
age. And it is the soul and not the mind 
that rules in the crisis of passionate 
action. 

The systematic training that has been 
imposed upon the whole German people 
from childhood, from the kindergarten 
to the barrack, has carefully nursed the 
primitive, elemental savagery that lies 
lurking in the dim recesses of the soul of 



206 HEROIC FRANCE 

all of us. The test of our civilized state 
is how completely we have crushed that 
beast. It has been the policy of the Ger- 
man War Lords to cultivate German bru- 
taUty — and to give it a new name — 
Kultur. 

The indifference of the world at large 
of late years to German literature 
accounts for much of the want of en- 
lightened perception of the processes 
going on in German life and thought. 
Since Carlyle, there has been no prophet 
to preach Germany's great "Mission" 
to the world. She herself was to write 
it later in the flames of Louvain and 
Rheims. 

Her designs on the world's possessions 
were, it is true, more or less skillfully 
concealed by an outward show of friend- 
liness. She sang lullaby s of "peace" to 
the nations. The nations heard the 



TEE CONTRAST IN IDEALS 207 

soothing strains — and dozed. Even when 
foreign generals and officers were invited 
to witness the manoeuvres of the German 
armies at the great Reviews, they came 
away convinced all the German bands 
were playing hymnal praise of peace. 
Germany took no pains to hide her 
growth in power. She asked half the 
world to come and celebrate her opening 
of the Kiel Canal; yet those who ac- 
cepted half believed in the fraudulent 
suavities repeated again and again — 
that Germany was increasing her naval 
force solely to protect her commerce. 

The attitude of Germany towards 
France since Sedan has been one of 
scarcely concealed envy. The rapidity 
with which France recovered after her 
crushing defeat in 1870; her amazing 
industrial, commercial and financial de- 
velopment after the smashing blow to 



208 HEROIC FRANCE 

her prosperity, proved her the first 
nation in Europe in point of view of 
thrift, of financial soundness and of re- 
cuperative strength. Bismarck had 
counted on France ''being rendered 
powerless" for at least fifty years, after 
paying the war indemnity of .£200,000,- 
000, or $1,000,000,000. In less than 
twenty years she had become the bankers 
of Europe. To offset the loss of her two 
productive provinces, Alsace and Lor- 
raine, France has pushed the interests of 
her colonies in Africa, Egypt, and in 
China to become contributive elements 
to France's prosperity. Her clever and 
gifted diplomats have proved to Europe 
that the atmosphere of courts was not 
needed to develop statesmanlike talents, 
since they could proudly point to 
"L'Entente Cordiale" as the master 
stroke of modern French diplomacy. 



THE CONTRAST IN IDEALS 209 

That Paris also should continue to 
be the literary, artistic, theatrical and 
mondaine centre of the world, the gayest 
as well as the most beautiful of cities, 
has been a bitter blow to German civic 
and national pride. Why should Unter 
den Linden, peopled with wonderful, 
modern statues, fail to attract the world 
that mistakenly prefers the Champs 
Elysees and the Bois de Boulogne— 
meagerly decorated with marble "master- 

pieces: 

Germany has been taught many things 
in the last forty years. A true feeling 
and a profound knowledge for art; a 
reverence for artistic and architectural 
masterpieces, are alas! tastes that cannot 
be taught. Artistic appreciation of the 
beautiful is a matter of slow growth. 
Centuries of progress and the slow de- 
posit of artistic sensibilities in genera- 



210 HEROIC FRANCE 

tions of men build up that rare quality 
we call taste. Without this delicate 
flowering of a nation's development, no 
real art flourishes. 

Sparta was a military state; but it is 
the influence of Athens that has survived 
the downfall of classical Greece. It 
is Athenian art and literature that have 
been the fructifying element throughout 
the world. Ideas that take on forms of 
beauty; ideas embodied in beauty of 
form — it is these spiritualized, etherial- 
ized emanations of creative genius that 
alone put on immortality. 

The discovery of Aristotle's works gave 
birth to the Renascent spirit in Italy; 
the art of Greece and her literature 
are the masterpieces other nations copy 
— and rarely if ever have equaled. 

The spirit that animated Sparta was 
the positive, utilitarian, military spirit. 



THE CONTRAST IN IDEALS 211 

But it is ideas, and not the soul of a 
nation bent to purely material ends, to 
military despotism, that survive. 

The spirit of miUtarism that has pre- 
vailed throughout Prussianized Germany 
has largely killed that refined, intellectual 
delight in beauty that made Goethe the 
master-poet and artist, that inspired 
German Art critics of the mid-nineteenth 
century, and that made Heine an im- 
mortal. Germany's mistaken ideas of 
"Kultur" are therefore self -doomed. For 
not only does she consider her intellectual 
and scientific development as supreme, 
but she has conceived the dangerous 
doctrine of insisting that the mighty 
military base on which rests the whole 
structure of her might fits her pre- 
eminently for governing the world. Now, 
no mihtary state has ever long survived. 
If for no other cause, the ambition of 



212 HEROIC FRANCE 

those who lead or head such a state 
doom the system to final destruction, — as 
was the case with the Roman Empire. 
In our times and century this attempt 
to turn back the clock is a particularly 
dangerous expedient. The whole trend 
of modern development since the French 
Revolution and the American Declara- 
tion of Independence has been towards 
freedom, equality, and the loosening up 
of the rigors of governmental control. 
This German ideal of the training of a 
whole nation into a machine is contrary 
to the prevailing spirit of the age. Every- 
thing mankind has been fighting for for 
two thousand years will be lost, only, it 
is true, to be reconquered, were Germany 
to be victorious. For were even the 
dreaded worst to befall, the long, old- 
world struggle would but begin anew. 
The spirit of man reaches towards free- 



THE CONTRAST IN IDEALS 213 

dom, as a blade of grass pushes its frail, 
but sufficient strength upwards through 
the earth clod. Through revolutions 
and revolts the unconquered, uncon- 
querable human spirit struggles on to 
higher forms of development. The slow 
but grinding process of spiritual and 
moral evolution would eventually crush 
the German positivist out of existence 
— for the soul of man goes marching on. 
France will come out of this gigantic 
struggle purified, electrified. For a time, 
as has been the case in every great war, 
her soldiers will be found to be turbulent, 
restive, difficult as civic, assimilative 
forces. And the nation will be a nation 
in mourning. Even those of her men 
who return will suffer from the effects 
of their hardships; many will have in- 
curable wounds to nurse and crippled 
frames to adapt to new conditions. 



214 HEROIC FRANCE 

But France has passed before our 
day beneath the rough ploughshare of 
war's horrors. Her wars have planted 
their seeds of heroism; the sap will 
rise again and bear its golden fruit. 

Of all the "dead who speak" — "les 
morts qui parlent" — none will catch the 
inspiring song with quicker ear than the 
responsive, emotional French people. 
She will rise to heights she has never 
before attained; she will also re-capture 
her temporarily lost, inestimably precious 
art. For above all other nations she has 
learned the precious lesson and has whis- 
pered to us the priceless secret — the joy 
of living! la joie de vive. 

Long live France! 



Deacidified using the Bcwkkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: ^^y 2%] 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIOM 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



